Carol Upadhya: Performing in the Indian Outsourcing Industry

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 also made three ethnographic films ‘Coding Culture: Bangalore's Software Industry’ in collaboration with Gautam Sonti (NIAS-IDPAD project 2006).

With A.R.Vasavi she edited the revealing study ‘”In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India's Information Technology Industry” (New Delhi: Routledge, 2008).
In 1988 Upadhya obtained a Ph.D. in social-cultural anthropology from Yale University. She was Research Fellow, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, 2002-2003, Reader in Sociology, Department of Post-Graduate Studies and Research, S.N.D.T. Women's University, Mumbai, 1997-2001 and Editorial Consultant for Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, 1994 - 1996.
With Mario Rutten she edited the volume “Small Business Entrepreneurs in Asia and Europe: Towards a Comparative Perspective” (New Delhi: Sage Publications 1997).
Carol Upadhya grew up in the Unites States of America and lived most of her adult live in India, where she married and raised her family.

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 fundamental aspect of the IT business in India is that it is mostly an outsourcing industry.

The Indian companies, which work mostly for larger clients outside India, have developed the so-called ‘Global Service Delivery’ model in which they take advantage of various time zones around the world. Collaborations and work move from one place to another, so that 24 hours a day the work in India is going on. In addition to the big multinational companies operating in India, and the large Indian software services companies such as Infosys, there are also small start-up companies, so-called high end product companies. Some of these companies self-consciously replicate the Silicon Valley model of management. It is not that they are doing this replication, but they think of themselves as doing a kind of replication, which is to Carol Upadhya, being anthropologist, very interesting. Upadhya argues that the idea of cultural difference actually has become a mechanism for control over labour. She supports this argument in a variety of ways.

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

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 interesting high end contracts.

Even though the reputation of the Indian IT industry has been established by now, most workflow processes are still orchestrated in a ‘low trust’ manner. In larger distributed projects there are online mechanisms, which record the work in different places and these statistics are fed back to the manager in packages. It is in a highly technical quantifiable way that projects are monitored. Very often on the client side the project is also being monitored every single day. The client does not just send an order to India and say come back in 6 months and show me what you have done. Every single day, nearly every hour the work of every person is monitored. This ‘low trust’ environment affects the people who work in it.

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 things that always get said about Indian engineers, especially from the European perspective, which is where I did the work.

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 regardless of where they are from. But in spite of ‘getting global’, Upadhya finds that it really matters where a person comes from.

In cross-border projects a lot of the problems that crop up are identified as communication gaps or as a cross-cultural problems by the people involved. In order to understand the problems they face, people talk in the language of differences in culture. Instead of understanding themselves as working in a common culture, the culture of IT maybe or digital culture or global information technology culture, they see themselves as being located in these very distinct traditional cultures. To Upadhya this shows that people, even when they are working in cyberspace most of the time, are in fact rooted in their localities. But at the same time she notices that in these dispersed teams and dispersed projects, people are not in equal positions. Upadhya finds that a system of hierarchy operates the system of control in this entire scenario.

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 work as very much driven by machines, as very mechanical.

Software production is a very mechanical process around the world, not only in India. They do not see themselves as being adjunct to the machine, but certainly they see themselves being stuck in a way in a very routine factory type of a setting. Hierarchy is very much there and yet there is a whole story about denial. People will say that they have flat structures and a lot of flexibility, giving the workers a lot of space and freedom and so on. This is again based again on the Silicon Valley thing. It is true in some surface kind of way, but Upadhya argues that actually it is a highly structured system and if it were not highly structured they could not do the work they are doing. They have huge software projects with hundreds of people working in them, everyone is working on a little piece and someone has to pull it together. So it is like a car assemble factory where the guys in the car factory probably have more autonomy than the software workers in the outsourcing industry, Upadhya suggests.

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 certain tasks and deadlines.

Interesting enough, this knowledge sharing happens not only between and within teams, but also between workers of different companies. Every company has this knowledge management system that is supposed to capture the knowledge which is created, but it actually doesn’t. A lot of knowledge is circulating in informal ways and those informal networks reach beyond the company. People will post a question on the Internet and people from other companies will answer. However, most companies are concerned about their Intellectual Property Rights and try to prevent this by closing down external networks like the Internet. Because the companies make this security ring, this is something people will go home and do, as became evident in Upadhya’s research. In this information sharing the whole question of promotion and salary is always in the background. People do not want to share too much, on the other hand you do help each other and you don’t want your boss to know when you are in trouble, you reach out to other people. This is where the knowledge sharing becomes complex, because if one shares too much knowledge with colleagues, this may give them one step ahead for promotion, so the competition is always there.

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 and sees what the workers are doing.

There is a client or a remote manager who is in another place and with that person one interacts via phone, Internet, email. Often all are brought together in the same networked system of machines. But then many people say that it is really hard to do a whole project like this. There are certain points in which you need to have this face-to-face communication’. And people feel this very strongly, Upadhya noticed. It is usually in the beginning and at the end of the project that people want to meet. In the beginning they are planning and designing or get the requirements. When clients give the specifications that is always face-to-face. And then at the end it is often what they call ‘post mortem’, everything that went wrong in the project, people sit together and figure that out.

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 go in day and night for over 7 days or on weekends to put in extra hours to get is sorted out.

A dynamical hierarchy is defining the work. When it is a marketing question then the marketing guys come in and will be dominant. And if it is a technical problem than the engineers would come in. In a small startup company there are regular group discussions and concerning the body language for example, you see the person who is the president, the CEO, his body language is very much that of the boss. You can see others around who seem to be subservient to him and others who are more his equal and will challenge him. They kept talking about the Silicon Valley model, because the whole idea is that this kind of an organization, that free open space and all, is what leads to innovation. So here they are told we are a high-end company, we are a product company, we are innovation driven and we are venture capital funded, therefore we are like this. And therefore all the people in the company start becoming like that. There is a kind of a studied casualness, informality, the jeans, the T-shirts, the way in which people talk to each other, very informal, very we all together. To Upadhya it seems that a lot of it is very engineered. It is not just you and me and all together we are doing something, there is engineering behind that freedom, that so-called freedom.

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.

They have to develop ‘global’ communication skills to manifest themselves in a free innovative environment yet they operate in a highly controlled context where they are monitored all the time. They are witnessed and stage an identity to be witnessed with, yet the space in which they can take responsibility and be a witness themselves is very limited. This leads to a staging of professional identity that reflects an image, inspired by Silicon Valley models, of how a software engineer should be, and this deeply invades the self-reflection of the people involved as well. As a result, Upadhya argues, there is a great discrepancy between the actual practice and the self-image of the software engineers involved. However, people seem to resolve this by making a sharp distinction between professional and personal realms of life. Upadhya thinks that specifically in the Indian context this rupture is not problematic because traditional culture (enacted

View full transcript including film fragments here

Hereunder the transcript in text.