Project Title:
Diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies in India: Labour Market Implications for Developing Countries

Final Technical Report
by the
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B) India

Research Team
M. Vijayabaskar
Balaji Parthasarathy

Date of Submission: 31 July 2003

I Introduction to the Study

This project seeks to examine how different modes of use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) impact labour market outcomes in developing countries. Policy makers in developing countries face a fundamental dilemma as they try and take advantage of the ICT-led third industrial revolution. On one hand, since ICTs are a new and rapidly growing economic sector, creating an ICT industry can generate vast employment opportunities. Further, since ICTs are also enabling technologies, the growing share of knowledge-based production globally warrants that, from a macro-economic perspective, economies develop a degree of technological capability in this sector if they are to compete in international markets. From a micro-economic perspective, promoting ICT based industrialisation and deploying ICTs in pre-existing industrial sectors can impart greater flexibility and efficiency to production systems in user industries.

On the other hand, even as the development of the ICT sector promises to generate new employment by creating a demand for fresh skills and new occupational categories that may not be readily available even in developed countries, the deployment of ICTs in existing industries creates challenges by transforming the organization of production. At one level, automating production can displace labour. But even if labour redundancy in numerical terms in not an issue, rationalizing production by deploying ICTs is likely to render existing skills redundant, profoundly altering patterns of labour demand. These seemingly contradictory tendencies highlight the importance of a clear understanding of how the production and use of ICTs will affect labour markets. In contrast to the extent of interest in these issues in developed countries, the labour market impacts of ICTs have received little research attention in the context of developing economies even as they strive to simultaneously provide quality employment and to improve overall economic productivity and efficiency.

Research in developed countries, by organisational theorists and labour economists, clearly shows that there is no linear causal relationship between technological change and labour market outcomes because of the diversity of mediating factors. The impact therefore varies across sectors and organisational types within sectors, critically influenced by institutional factors that mediate between technical improvements and their use in organisations. Policy makers then are faced with pressing questions about how ICTs are likely to affect the quality of work and careers, skill enhancement, and autonomy at work. Questions are also raised as to whether ICTs foster equality or reinforce existing labour market segmentation, such as those based on gender, observed in traditional sectors. The proposed study will help answer such policy questions by examining the impact of ICTs on the Indian labour market in two different industries. One is the IT enabled service industry, a new (at least in India) ICT based sector that has emerged in the last five years. The other is the older automobile and automobile components manufacturing industry, which is deploying ICTs extensively to reap productivity benefits. The study seeks answers to the following research questions.

II Research Questions and Hypotheses

1.Does evidence from the ICT service industry and the automobile and component industry in India suggest that the promotion of ICT based industrialization in developing countries leads to:

• skill polarisationi.e. skilled workers with better knowledge of use of ICTs have better career and work opportunities, leaving the rest of workforce in dead-end, low-paying jobs.
• deskilling i.e. ICTs render traditional skills redundant and therefore tend to deskill the workforce.
• disintermediation i.e. ICTs reduce transactions costs involved in information flows within an organization and therefore undermine the need for middle management.
• gender neutrality i.e. ICTs reduce the need for physical labour and create white-collar jobs. Women, therefore, would find better employment prospects due to diffusion of ICTs.
• flexibility i.e. ICTs reduce coordination costs, allowing firms to rely on external labour markets and, therefore, promote greater labour market flexibility.
  autonomy at work i.e. ICTs ensure greater access to information among employees, therefore helping decentralized decision-making and giving employees greater autonomy at work.

2. How does the impact of ICT based industrialization on labour markets in India compare with changes observed elsewhere (developing and developed countries)?
3. What are the implications of the results of hypothesis testing and the comparison with other countries for:
Policy intervention in labour markets in developing countries
The relationship between technological change and labour market outcomes
In the following sections, we discuss the methodology used in the study, the results of our empirical examination and the implications in relation to the issues that the study seeks to address.

III Progress and Organisation of the Study

The study commenced from April 2002, with a detailed review of literature to locate the issue to be explored in larger theoretical debates on the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs hereafter) on labour markets (next section). The exercise also was meant to draw insights from empirical studies undertaken elsewhere in relation to some of the themes indicated in the proposal. Most studies deal with experiences in developed capitalist economies, further emphasising the need for similar exercises in the context of developing economies mired in large-scale chronic unemployment and underemployment on the one hand, and insecure employment in the informal economy on the other.

Subsequent to this exercise, secondary data pertaining to the automobile sector and ITES industry in India were collected, which is used to stress the relevance of the choice of the two sectors as well as to delineate the key characteristics of the two sectors. Gaps identified are filled by recourse to primary data collection. Draft questionnaires were developed; one each for Human Resources Heads in the two sectors and one each for employees in the two sectors taken up for study. Pilot testing was done in one firm each in the two sectors. In the automobile industry, it was found that the impact was highly differentiated across jobs in the occupational hierarchy. Hence, a random sample survey proved to be a highly inadequate method for collecting data, especially given the large numbers employed and small sample size decided upon. However, a purposive sample could have been used, taking employees from each level. Given the reluctance of firm management to allow us to conduct such a large-scale survey among their employees, and the need to collect information on employees employed at different levels, we discarded such a method for a case study approach after a carefully evolved typology of firms and jobs. We reduced the number of firms to be studied from 15 to four, and more employees taken up for study in each firm. A checklist is used to collect information from heads of human resource departments on firm level changes in recruitment patterns, employment levels and reasons. A checklist is used to elicit information from the employees and the interviews were in a semi-structured format (Annexes I and II).

In the ITES sector, we focussed primarily on the call centre industry that has few levels in the organisation, making it amenable to a sample survey. Structured questionnaires are used for collecting most data from the employees and Human Resource heads (Annexes III and IV). Information on stress levels, reactions to the work environment were collected subsequent to the structured interview through follow-up questions in the form of a free-wheeling interview. Information has been collected from four automobile firms, three call centers, one medical transcription firm and one back office processing firm. In the automobile industry, a total of 80 employees have been studied so far and from the ITES industry, only 60 have been surveyed. Reluctance on the part of management to provide information or permission to interview employees prevents us from accessing more respondents during the period of study. However, interviews with key informants and more detailed case studies are undertaken to capture additional dimensions of work and employment.

IV. Contextual Background to the Study

Promotion of information and communication technology (ICT hereafter) based industrialisation has been the concern of many a state initiative in the less-industrialised countries including India. The reasons are quite clear. Its adoption by user industries imparts greater flexibility and efficiency to production systems. Two, the growing share of knowledge-based production at the global level warrants economies to develop a degree of technological capability that would equip them to compete in the global market better. And finally, given a perceived ability to create decent employment opportunities, governments perceive the promotion of ICTs to be critical to employment generation. Its net effect on employment generation apart, its potential to shift patterns in skill demand, to alter existing patterns of labour market segmentation and thereby reduce or aggravate inequities across segments is even more important to labour market intervention. A critical review of literature pertaining to these aspects of ICT diffusion is therefore warranted to understand the various dimensions.

Earlier, labour market changes brought about by new technologies were very much along the pattern posited by Braverman (1974). Skilled jobs, mainly the jobs of men in manufacturing industries of developed countries, were either deskilled over time or reduced due to automation. Simultaneously, there was an expansion of low-skilled jobs particularly in the manufacture of electronic components which offered considerable employment opportunities to less skilled women in several developing countries, especially in south east Asia. Such trends tended to create visions of new technologies favouring women's employment unlike traditional technologies that denied women access to the domain of paid work.

Also, diffusion of ICTs has increased the ability of firms to link distant markets, economise on inputs and increase speed of product design, development and production. The potential created by the enormous flexibility of the microelectronic technologies opens up new avenues of employment opportunities, which is yet to be realised in several low-income economies including India. Since the same equipment can be used for a large variety of designs and production processes, producers can switch between different designs and products as well as quantities of output without deleterious loss in efficiency. They are therefore in a position to undertake mass customisation without significantly adding to their unit costs. However, for such production to be efficient, it is imperative that the labour working on those machines understands the new technologies and is also well informed about product market trends. Moreover, for a smooth transition from one product or process to another, the workers need to work in close cooperation with one another as well as with management. New technologies are therefore argued to provide an opportunity for a more creative engagement with work for labour as well as encourage teamwork (Piore and Sabel, 1984).

Trends of deskilling and feminisation of employment on the one hand, and creation of creative, artisan-type jobs on the other hand, are therefore widely noted. However, the impact of diffusion of ICTs across different sectors in the economy on the labour market remains under explored in less industrialised regions like India characterised by multitudes of production relations and labour market institutions quite different from that in advanced capitalist economies. In low-income countries like India actively striving to compete in global markets and promote ICT based sectors, such diverse outcomes of ICT use can pose anxieties. Uncertainties exist not only about the likely size of the additional employment in this field in India, but also importantly about the nature of those jobs, the kind of labour that would be required for them, and the prospects of it being available and actually drawn from among women. As several studies have pointed out, there have been marked differences in the impact on labour processes of these new technologies, even between countries at apparently similar stages of development. It has also been pointed out that the pace and form of utilisation of available technologies are crucially dependent on the institutional background of a given economy (Freeman and Perez, 1988). Given the lack of adequate understanding of the relationship between diffusion of ICTs and labour market impacts in India, a study of this kind becomes important.

V. Analytical Review

ICTs play out their impacts at the micro-economic level within certain broad macro-economic contours. The important contextual feature that needs to be privileged is the growing reliance on the world market for economic growth among the less industrialised regions. Limits to import-substitution based industrialisation (ISI) has forced governments in these countries to resort to a greater reliance on the external market for inputs and outputs. Ensuring competitiveness in the world market therefore assumes an unprecedented importance among policy makers of these countries. Production structures have to therefore cater to such markets effectively.

Accompanying this process of globalisation has been changes in the characteristics of dominant global output markets. To begin with, it is observed that there is a shift from production based on mass markets to one based on fragmented and flexible markets. The earlier era typically characterised as Fordist, emphasised mass production technologies, scale economies, detailed technical division of labour, divorce of conception from execution leading to monotonous, routinised work for a majority of the work force and a hierarchical organisational structure. Productivity and hence, the profit rate was sought to be raised through scale economies. Goods were relatively homogenous and produced for mass consumption. Wage rates were linked to productivity increases, thereby ensuring a steady market for the mass-produced goods. Mass production facilitated a greater technical division of labour and both in turn led to the creation of a dual labour market, with a managerial and designer elite at the top, leaving the numerically larger manual workers at the bottom of the hierarchy undertaking less skilled tasks. Job mobility was primarily internal and dependent on period of employment. Further, the rise of vertically integrated large firms helped the formation of class-consciousness and consequent development of worker associations to protect their interests.

The Fordist organisation, embedded as it were in a Keynesian welfare state in most advanced capitalist economies, assured employment security and social welfare to most employees. Mass production enabled a significant number of citizens to access goods never available or affordable to them earlier. Within this framework it was possible to successfully formulate and implement collective bargaining arrangements related to salaries, working conditions and leisure time for a significant share of employees in the manufacturing and services sectors (Marglin and Schor 1990). [1]

This seemingly stable arrangement began to reach its optimal productivity levels by the end of 1960s. Inflexibility of wage rates due to strong worker associations, in conjunction with the inherent limits to extent of division of labour soon forced decreases in profitability of capital. This crisis in Fordism is held to have set off two crucial processes. One, firms in the advanced capitalist economies began to move out of the confines of the domestic market to explore new markets, especially in the peripheral economies. Second, and more important in the context of this study, they began to shift the labour-intensive segments of the production process as a means to cut down costs of production (Froebel, Henricks and Kreye 1980). Simultaneously, at the level of the nation-state, the crises led to a weakening of the welfare regime and initiated the process of cutting back on social security provisions. The last mentioned factor along with the shift of manufacturing operations to the periphery is argued to have led to the demise of mass consumption due to skewedness in income distribution. [2] This collapse of mass markets, leaving in its economies towards assuring scope economies through greater product differentiation and adaptability to customer preferences. The resultant industrial organisation system best suited to the new production and distribution has come to be termed as post or neo-Fordist, or flexible specialisation systems (Amin 1994). They are characterised by the following:

· Heavy dependence on ICTs
· Customised products and services
· Greater inter-firm division of labour, but well-networked with one another and with clients
· More flexible and ability to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions
· Less hierarchical, decentralised organisational structure, empowered, creative workers, encourages team-working
· Global Operations

The increased diffusion of ICTs has therefore taken place under such sweeping organisational and market changes and in fact appears to aid this process. Impacts on labour, often attributed to purely technological change, are therefore an outcome of a complex interplay of all these factors.

1. ICTs and Employment in Developing Countries with special Reference to India

Impacts of ICTs on the organisation of production and employment in industrialised and to a limited extent in less industrialised countries have been extensively discussed (Castells 1999; Bryanjolfsson and Hitt 1998; ILO 2001). Discussions essentially relate to its enabling potential for employment and quality of work, and questions are raised as to whether such technologies foster equality or reinforce existing polarities between regions, classes and gender. Studies also point to the opportunities they present for low income countries (LICs), in terms of employment for school leavers and earning foreign exchange, and on the unsubstantiated expectation that such relocation of work offers the opportunity to 'leapfrog' into a new technology age in which LICs could have a comparative advantage (ILO 2001). Since this technology is not matured, they are at early stages of the product life cycle, which enables firms in developing economies to build capabilities much faster (Perez and Soete 1988). Second, many sectors within iCTs rely more on human capital and less on physical capital investments rendering build-up of human capital base critical to the 'catching-up' process. It is therefore believed that developing economies that have a strong human capital base like India may be successful in such efforts.The discussion on the diffusion of ICTs in such countries, has however, by and large ignore the contractual position, wages, career paths and working conditions including employee health and safety of new technology workers. Given the amount of interest in these issues within the advanced capitalist economies, this is a serious omission.

Simultaneously, with the increasing role of information processing and micro-electronic based technologies in production, even in traditional sectors, a failure to develop technological capabilities in this sector poses a serious threat to such economies. Lack of infrastructure, physical like telecommunications, or social like educational institutions, do constrain economies from taking advantage of this 'window of opportunity'. In such a context, the new technologies may result in creating or accentuating economic inequality between regions. This has led to a series of state initiatives in many of the less-industrialised regions to promote sectors that produce information and communication goods and services, but importantly sectors that are enabled by these technologies. India has been a forerunner in this regard, and has managed to build capabilities in some segments of ICTs, especially in the software services segment. However, studies also observe that there are several barriers that restrict firms from moving into more value-adding segments of the sectors (Heeks 1996).

The promotion of ICT sectors in India takes place amidst concerns of large-scale underemployment and employment generation initiatives by policy makers. Despite more than five decades of planned industrialisation, access to employment in the formal sector in India is confined to less than 10 per cent of the total workforce in the country. Given that regulated work conditions, wage levels and employment security are confined to this sector, policy initiatives to enhance employment in this segment is important. Even within this formal sector, however, disparities based on gender and caste continues to be reproduced (Rothboeck and Acharya 1999). Policies like positive discrimination in the public sector and promotion of sectors that employ women have been formulated to generate social equity through employment in this segment.

Significantly, since the 1980s, there have been strong indications of a job-less growth in the organised manufacturing sector (Nagaraj 1994; Goldar 2000). Even in the 1990s, we observe that employment in the organised sector as a whole has only grown at roughly an annual average rate of 1.5 per cent between July 1987 and December 1997. [3] The problem has been further compounded by a burgeoning supply of educated youth seeking employment in the formal sector. It is in this context that the significance given to the ICT based sectors like the software sector needs to be understood. In India, rooted in four decades of import-substitution based industrialisation, a relatively healthy base in ICT production has been created. This, coupled with trends at the global industrial level, has led to the creation of a vibrant software industry. Despite being located in a peripheral region, it is one of the fastest growing segments of the global software industry. A consistent annual growth rate of over 50 per cent throughout the 1990s is unparalleled, which is believed to continue in the years to come (Kumar 2000).

Therefore, the government has identified ICTs to be a thrust sector for future growth in national wealth and quality employment. [4] The period since the 1960s has also seen the government emphasising the need to reduce employment discrimination against women, especially in the public sector (Banerji 2000). The recently established IT taskforce to the government which addresses the future of IT industry including software production expects a net employment creation by 2.2 million employees by the year 2008 (NASSCOM 2000). Further, this sector, especially IT-enabled services like call centres, medical transcription, back office work processing, etc., are held to offer considerable employment avenues for women unlike the traditional manufacturing sector (Mitter and Rowbotham 2000). Elsewhere, especially in the South East Asian newly industrialising economies (NICs), introduction of ICT sectors like information processing and hardware assembly led to the entry of large numbers of women into the labour force, lending credibility to such initiatives to enhance women's participation in the workforce (http://sdnp.delhi.nic.in/resources/labour/news/bl-24-8-women.htmlref). Given the potential role envisaged for ICTs in both employment generation and reduction in labour market segmentation, it is worthwhile to understand the various approaches and examine empirical support to them as a prelude to our enquiry.

At another level, the reduction in internal and external barriers to entry has forced firms in traditional manufacturing sectors to explore new markets and reckon with competition from new firms, especially technologically superior transnational firms. Such pressures have forced firms to turn to deployment of ICTs to reduce costs as well as to cut lead times and make organisations respond efficiently to market changes. It also meant that firms have to improve the quality of non-production functions like marketing and after-sales service. ICTs play a major role in effecting such changes in both intra-firm processes and in transactions between firms and their suppliers and service providers. The Indian automobile industry is an exemplar in this regard. With the entry of a number of new firms, older firms have resorted to organisational innovations like Japanese management techniques along with introduction of ICTs to transform organisational structure and processes. The changes do have repercussions for employment and quality of work. Prospects for disintermediation may entail both loss of jobs as well as reduced or enhanced prospects for mobility. Organisations can take advantage of information availability to increase transparency as well as decentralise decision-making, thereby enhancing the responsibility of workers in lower levels in the organisation. Automation may lead to job losses in the shopfloor as well apart from reducing the quantum of routine tasks that are to be performed. The industry also offers secure employment in the formal sector in large numbers apart from providing employment to many others in the informal sector through its supplier base and other linkage effects. The organisational innovations sweeping the industry may have significant impacts not only on the inter-firm division of labour but also on the quality of work generated across these firms. In the next section, we review the literature on the impact of ICTs on work and employment at the global level.

2. Overview of Findings on ICTs, Work and Employment

It has been observed that the impact of technical change on quality of work and employment are crucially mediated by organisational imperatives (Holfman and Novak 2002). At the same time, organisational forms, outcomes of a multiplicity of factors including technologies deployed, are also transformed as a result of adoption of new technologies. As has been observed in the case of substitution of water mills with steam power in the textile industry and the transformation of the putting-out system to workshop based production with the advent of centralised power sources, technologies even transform the spatial structure of an industry. That firms derive productivity benefits of new technologies only when their adoption is accompanied by appropriate organisational innovations is well documented (Murphy 2002).

The new organisational shift towards a more global, flexible mode, relies heavily on deployment of advances made in the realm of information and communication technologies to co-ordinate the decentralised production and distribution segments. While the movement from Fordist to post-Fordist organisational models was facilitated by developments in ICTs, the enhanced demand for these technologies in the post-Fordist context has set the ground for rapid technical change and growth of this sector. The rise of knowledge based production systems are also argued to play its part in reconfiguring the Fordist labour market into post-Fordist or 'flexible labour markets'.

Developments in ICTs enable firms to co-ordinate spatially dispersed activities without much increase in transaction costs through effective functioning of information networks. Another area where developments in IT have facilitated the new organisation is in the realm of production flexibility. [5] To cater to a highly customised demand, dedicated machines that perform routine tasks become redundant. Instead, machines need to adapt efficiently to changes in output and this has been made possible by the use of computer numerically controlled machines (CNCs) and computer aided design and manufacturing. Changing market trends play an overarching role in enhancing the need for ICTs in firms. Higher customisation, on the one hand, makes acquiring relevant information on finer consumer differences critical to successful competition. In addition, increased competition based on innovation renders decreasing the time to market period critical to competition. The importance of ICTs to firms operating in such a context of greater relevance of information is therefore obvious. Though this dimension is evident even in traditional industries like clothing, footwear, etc., it is especially high in the growth of the knowledge-based sectors like hardware and software sectors of computers, microelectronics and telecommunications. These changes are expected to exert a strong influence on work and employment, and also contribute to productivity and output increases in related sectors. [6] Further, given its ability to automate physically demanding manual tasks, it undermines the basis of gender-based discrimination witnessed in industrial labour markets and hence, offers the potential to provide employment opportunities for women, marginally represented in such sectors earlier. Research on the micro-economic impact of ICTs, apart from productivity impacts, can be broadly classified into three strands (Laudon and Marr); impact on organisational structure, on quality of work and on labour market segmentation. We examine each of these strands in the following sub-sections.

a) Impact on Organisational Structure and Firm size

One stream of enquiry, based on a transaction based understanding of firm formation, focuses upon how ICTs transform organisational landscapes; the inter-firm and intra-firm division of labor and its co-ordination through market or authority (Blau, 1976; Laudon 1976; Kling and Iacono 1984; Gurbaxani and Whang 1991; Carley 2000). It perceives the rise of firms due to imperfect information in markets and consequent costs associated with search and coordination as a determining factor. Organisations therefore have an optimal structure that minimises the costs of information acquisition and processing as well as its use in monitoring, etc. To the extent that deployment of ICTs enhance either the availability of information or increase the ease of processing, the structures need to be transformed to ensure better utilisation of ICTs deployed. In principle, ICTs are available to all firms in an economy. However, it is found that its effective implementation towards economic gains is dependent upon organisational restructuring to ensure an optimal structure given the new technological regime (Bresnahan and Greenstein 1997). There are various propositions concerning how ICTs can change organisations. To begin with, is the proposition that ICTs may alter firm size; lead to the rise of smaller firms. The arguments for this reduction in firm size proposition are two, labour substitution and outsourcing.

(i) Labour substitution:
This hypothesis is based on the fact that increased automation leads to reduced need for labour as well as enhanced productivity. When capital investments in IT are cheaper compared to employment of labour, firms may substitute IT for labour. This process can be further divided into IT-enabled machines replacing manual labour in the shop floor and ICTs replacing those employed in data processing and communication. However, empirical evidence to support this hypothesis has not been convincing, as exemplified by the discussion on "IT productivity paradox" (Brynjolfsson 1993). Its effects are also conditioned by labour market rigidities. In labour markets with few barriers to exit, it may be expected that ICTs displace labour. On the other hand, under rigid labour market conditions, deployment of ICTs ought to take place without displacement of labour, probably altering the nature of work. Once again, while firm-level impacts are easier to discern, larger macro-economic impacts are difficult to discern due to the multiple and overlapping influences on employment like output markets, policy variables, etc. Furthermore, studies of the relationship between IT and employment, also indicate that IT may actually increase employment, and may in fact complement employment rather than substitute (Morrison and Berndt 1990). Such findings however, do not shed any light on the changes in skill or job profile, if any, that use of ICTs may require. Similarly, use of ICTs may improve labour productivities, lowering the cost per unit of output. Assuming that the price elasticity of demand for that output is high, demand for that product increases forcing firms to expand capacity, leading to increased firm size. Though empirical evidence for this possibility is not available, it definitely goes to show that industry-specific variables too condition the impact of ICTs.

(ii) Outsourcing:
Another important impact of ICTs, especially in the context of low-income economies with a significant presence of the informal economy, is its ability to reduce transaction and co-ordination costs, and consequent impact on firm size. ICTs may lead to smaller sized firms because they enable firms to outsource more of their activities. ICTs enhance firms' ability to buy rather than make more of the components and services inputs required for production and/or delivery. It implies reconfiguration of inter-firm division of labour with its attendant implications for labour mobility.

The choice depends upon relative costs of production vis a vis that of coordination. While production costs refer to the costs of the physical production process itself, the latter refer to the costs of 'managing the dependencies' between production tasks. It would include, for example, costs of ensuring availability of material and factor inputs at the right time, ensure movement of work-in-progress through the production process, etc. Co-ordination costs can be internal or external. Internal co-ordination costs include the costs of managers and others who decide when, where, and how to produce whereas, external co-ordination costs include (a) the supplier's costs for marketing, sales, and billing and (b) Costs for finding suppliers, negotiating contracts, and payments. In both cases, as can be seen, co-ordination costs include information intensive activities such as gathering information, communicating, and making decisions. Since ICT is particularly useful to such information intensive activities, several works suggest how IT might affect firm size by reducing these co-ordination costs, depending upon which kinds of costs are affected most (Gurbaxani and Whang 1991). Transaction cost theory (Coase 1988; Williamson 1985) that most deals with information processing imperative of firms suggests the following possibilities with regard to diffusion of ICTs and its impact on firm size and structure. [7]

b. Reducing internal co-ordination costs relative to external coordination

If IT reduces the costs of internal co-ordination more than external co-ordination, then we would expect firms to make more things internally. This means that firm size will increase with use of ICTs. To cite, if IT reduces costs for managers to monitor and control their subordinates' work in a large organisation, then this might lead firms to make more things internally where they could be controlled more effectively and at less cost than if they were purchased from an external supplier. One type of internal co-ordination cost simply involves provisioning of information to decision-makers and transmission of information about these decisions to different levels in the organisation. Another important internal co-ordination cost arises when the interests of individual employees are different from that of the firm as is quite often the case. Pointed out by proponents of 'agency' theory, firms incur costs to monitor and have to provide incentives and disincentives to ensure performance (Jensen 2000). Since all these activities are information-intensive, theoretically it seems plausible that ICTs may affect their costs. The last aspect, as can be seen, has obvious implications for autonomy of labour, which will be discussed later.

c. Reducing external co-ordination costs more than internal
If ICT reduces the costs of external co-ordination more than internal co-ordination, then we would expect firms to rely more on outsourcing for their inputs. The average size of firms will therefore decrease. For example, if it is easier and cheaper for a firm to find an external supplier for new parts than to make them internally, then the firm is more likely to buy the parts from external suppliers than to set up internal manufacturing capacity. This phenomenon is especially evident in the case of the automobile industry, which requires a large number of small component inputs for a single unit of output. Typically, 70 to 80 per cent of their component inputs are sourced from external suppliers.

When firms want to buy components from independent firms, they are often threatened by the possibility of "opportunistic" behaviour of firms with whom they negotiate and enter into contracts, forcing them to incur costs to reduce the scope or impact of such behaviour (such as legal and accounting expenses). Such costs would not be necessary if the same transactions were co-ordinated internally. For example, when a supplier invests in special machinery that is useful only for one customer, the supplier is vulnerable if that customer threatens to buy somewhere else. Similarly, when it is difficult for buyers to find out about alternative sources of supply, they are vulnerable to monopolistic pricing from their suppliers.

Use of ICTs make available better quality information to firms and thereby reduce the scope for opportunism (Brynjolfsson 2000; Brynjolfsson, Malone and Gurbaxani 1988). By reducing the costs of searching and accounting activities that are needed for co-ordination with external suppliers, IT can make outsourcing more attractive to firms. A related effect of IT is its role in reducing market co-ordination costs by changing the "specificity" of assets themselves. For instance, Klein, Crawford and Alchian (1978), and Grossman and Hart (1986) have emphasised that when assets are specific to one another, market co-ordination will be inefficient and this may lead to common ownership of large, related sets of assets. However, if IT facilitates techniques like flexible manufacturing, it may decrease the specificity of assets, and thus transform internal production into production organised through smaller units co-ordinated by markets.

d. Reducing co-ordination costs more than production costs:
While in the above two sections, we traced the impact of relative changes in different types of coordination costs on the inter-firm division of labour, other studies point to the changes wrought about by reduction in coordination costs in total (both internal and external) in relation to production costs. It is argued that when both kinds of co-ordination costs decline relative to production costs, it would still favour buying to producing in-house. First, as noted above, the costs of identifying suppliers and negotiating contracts make external co-ordination more expensive than co-ordinating the same activities internally (Williamson 1985). However, when external suppliers cater to a large number of customers, they can reap gains from scale economies of scale and efficiency through specialisation that internal production could not achieve. Thus, in general, buying rather than making leads to higher co-ordination costs but lower production costs.

If IT reduces both internal and external co-ordination costs, it will decrease the disadvantages of sourcing from external suppliers. If more outsourcing occurs because of this or any of the other effects, we should expect a decrease in firm size, in terms of both material assets and numbers employed. As can be seen, unlike the labour substitution proposition based on automation, here, employment does not decline, but gets divided among new independent firms. There is limited evidence to suggest that ICTs do lead to a decline in firm size in certain industries. A study of the metal-working industry found that there was a fragmentation of vertical integrated firms and that this could be partly attributed to increased use of ICTs (Carlsson, 1988).

While the above discussion pertains to impact of ICT use on firm size, another related set of questions concerned the impact of use of computers on distribution of power within an organisation, ie, its ability to increase centralised authority or to decentralise decision-making powers, with its attendant implications for labour autonomy and control over work. Empirical evidence is again divided on this. While some studies found a considerable increase on centralisation of decsion-making power subsequent to introduction of computers, another set of studies pointed to contradictory tendencies. One study (Blau et.al 1976) interestingly observed from a sample of over 100 manufacturing firms, that use of computers 'onsite' led to dencentralisation while their 'offsite' use promoted centralisation.

Admittedly, both these sets of studies were based on the assumption that technology was the prime mover that determined the distribution of power within an organisation. This premise was soon questioned by another set of scholars in the 1970s who argued for a more complex explanation for organisational structure. In fact, the causality was seen to be reversed by some scholars (Laudon 1974) who felt that the way technologies are deployed in an organisation was dependent upon the authority structures present. Technologies, in this case, only acted as a tool to reinforce structures that management deemed appropriate. This understanding implies that management, faced with many options, do not face any constraints in implementing what they perceive to be the best. This perspective, termed as the 'organisational imperative' by George and King (1991) in opposition to the 'technological imperative' that guided research earlier, has been tempered by the same authors by drawing upon a 'reinforcement politics' perspective where organisations are constrained by their history and conflicting goals. Once again, the discussion, rather than argue for a specific kind of impact, highlights the importance of institutional factors in shaping outcomes.

3.ICTs and Nature of Employment

Another strand of literature concerns changes in the spatial organisation of work due to introduction of ICTs (Zuboff, 1984; Sproull and Kiesler, 1991) and implications for nature of employment generated. Since ICTs reduce coordination and communication costs, it is not necessary to bring workers together to a single workplace. As has been pointed out by Marglin(1974), the origins of the factory form of production organisation lay essentially in the need to monitor and control the pace of work as otherwise, it would be difficult to ensure compliance from the workers. Subsequently, it enabled the development of Taylorist techniques that not only reinforced capital's control over labour, but also created a dual labour market, with the separation of intellectual labour from manual labour. Use of ICTs, especially advanced communication technologies, coupled with appropriate incentives can provide an opportunity to employees to undertake homework, or more broadly 'telework', ie, distance working facilitated by ICTs. Since the nature of work is primarily information processing and knowledge creation, employees with access to information processing and communication tools can carry out their work without considerations of location. This possibility opened up by ICTs has even been seen as an environmentally sound option as it reduces the need for urban transport.

On the flip side, it also weakens the traditional bases for organising labour and collective representation of labour. ICTs, by facilitating firms to employ homeworkers on a contractual basis, are seen to promote insecure employment opportunities. In the Indian context as well as in the context of other low-income economies, this potential of ICTs is seen to push employment from the formal sector to small firms in the informal economy where employment is not protected by any legislation. Further, if this feature of ICTs encourage the formation of small firms that are narrowly specialised, it also implies that there is less room for employee mobility within firms, transforming the career paths of employees. Vertical mobility of employees will be ensured primarily through movement from one firm to another rather than through intra-firm mobility. While the above discussion pertains to changes in the nature of employment due to adoption of ICTs, ICTs are also expected to bring about significant changes in the realm of work content, skills demanded and consequent impacts on labour market segmentation.

4. ICTs and Quality of Work Content

The difference between the set of impacts discussed above and this aspect of impact stems from two perspectives of work, one as a source of fulfillment and another, as means to other ends. One, work is an end in itself, an expression of innate human aspiration to creative and meaningful labour. Second, work is means to earn income and secure livelihoods. While the earlier discussion pertains to work as means to ensure steady access to income and decent living conditions, here, we discuss about ICTs potential to create meaningful and fulfilling work for employees. There are generally two contrasting theses about new technologies including ICTs and impact on the quality of work:
a) the 'postindustrial thesis', in which automation is seen as liberating workers from routine tasks and producing a skilled, stable, well-paid and autonomous labour force (Bell 1973);
b) the 'degradation of work thesis', in which innovation is seen as designed to reduce skill requirements and transform work activities into repetitive routines, so that labour becomes cheap and easy to substitute (Braverman 1974; Aranowitz and Difazio 1994).

The former understanding of impact on work is partly related to the earlier discussions on labour substituting ICTs. Degrading, monotonous labour which was seen as essential to societal progress, but inimical to those employed at it can now be left to ICT driven machines, leaving human beings to take care of more creative and knowledge-based work. Proponents contend that as ICTs diffuse in an organisation, they undermine the need for routine clerical work and reduce some subset of blue-collared work as well. What cannot be automated are tasks that require exception processing, spatial or visual skills or those that require non-algorithmic reasoning (Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson and Hewitt 2000, 4). At another level, Beck even argues that we are at present in a stage where human beings can escape the tyranny of work as we now come to understand it (2000). Apart from such impacts in traditional sectors, the growing knowledge and information content of the new sectors too would require a highly skilled workforce. What this argument misses out is the growing complexity in division of labour as a society/economy progresses. Thus, while it may be true that ICTs does liberate a set of workers from drudgery, accompanied as they are by growing complexities of economies, it is quite possible that new tasks are created that may require labour of a very monotonous and unskilled kind that are not readily amenable to automation. In fact, the post-industrial thesis presupposes a movement towards dominance of the service economy in terms of both employment and production (Castells 1999, 203). Again, since substitution of labour by ICTs are driven by relative costs of labour, the extent to which the substitution takes place may differ across economies, with a lot less incentive for labour surplus economies to substitute as compared to that witnessed in advanced capitalist economies.

The second thesis stems from the Marxist perspective on capitalist dynamic as one driven by capital's need to exercise control over labour to ensure adequate extraction of surplus value. When capital engages labourers to work in a firm, the capitalist essentially buys the labourpower of the labourers and not their labour. It is therefore critical to capital to ensure that it extracts adequate labour from the labourpower of employees. This need to exercise greater control over labour is seen to be a primary factor conditioning the organisation of production in a capitalist society. Deskilling or reduction of complex tasks like that of a craft worker into simple tasks is important to this end. When the broken down tasks can be undertaken by unskilled workers, it reduces the bargaining power of skilled labour while simultaneously serving to expand the supply of labour from which capital can draw from. The introduction of Taylorist principles to the shopfloor, for instance, seeks to reduce labour's control over the pace of work, and thereby improves capital's ability to extract the requisite amount of labour.

Braverman's work, taking cue from Marx's analyses of factory system in England in the wake of the Industrial revolution, is premised on the above logic of the capitalist firm. However, critics have pointed to the absence of the possible role that labour struggles can play in modifying strategies in the workplace (Edwards 1979). Workers, by resisting deskilling efforts of capital can force capital to resort to other means of extracting surplus value including use of more productive technologies. As can be seen, deskilling or degradation of work has less to do with technologies per se, but are only visible in the need for capital to control the pace and quality of work. Information and communication technologies, when used towards this purpose may downgrade the quality of work. Another criticism of the deskilling hypothesis concerns the very notion of skill that Braverman uses to explain the process of deskilling. He derives his understanding of skills from craft based skills, which may not necessarily be valid in a different historical period.

At a theoretical level, since ICTs reduce coordination costs between different work processes, it facilitates/encourages firms to fragment tasks so as to enable them to improve labour productivity. At the same time, when routine tasks can be automated, ICTs reduce unskilled work. This has led to the argument that ICTs alter the distribution of employment among occupations and skill classes of workers (Braverman 1974; Katz 2000; ILO 2001). While the familiar pessimistic Luddite view is that technology will destroy jobs and increase unemployment, the other view is that new jobs, many of which are better paid, are being created in place of ones which cease to exist.

Let us however, now examine these contrasting propositions in relation to the empirical evidence generated through follow-up studies. A few confirm the deskilling hypothesis. Braverman, himself, analysing the impact of introduction of numerically controlled machine tools, found that it reduces the craft-based machine operator to that of a machine tender where the skill requirements are much lower. Kraft's (1979) study of impact of IT on computer programming too led to a similar conclusion. Programming, a highly craft-like job, has been subject to fragmentation and routinisation of tasks, leading to deskilling among software programmers. Greenbaum's study of transformation of software programming in the 1970s too noted deskilling tendencies, wherein efforts were undertaken to subdivide programming into less skilled, routine tasks and skilled ones (1976).

Such observations are supported by Aronowitz and DiFazio (1994, p. 21), who noted that the development of computer-aided software now threatens "the most glamorous of the technical professionals associated with computer technology programming. . . ." Although there will remain a need for "superprograrnmers" to create new and innovative software, the majority of computer programmers are likely to be replaced by intelligent software that is already capable of automatically writing most of the low-level, routine programming turned out by today's programmers (Aronowitz and DiFazio, 1994, p. 21, quoted in Gurbaxani et.al). Castells too observes that just as information technologies have eliminated a number of routine jobs, it has also created a need for new unskilled tasks (206).

On the other hand, studies do indicate the elimination of routine tasks like documentation and record-keeping, a tendency that questions the proposition that ICTs in general lead to a deskilled workforce (Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson and Hitt 2000). Even within software programming, it has been argued (Brooks 1976) that programming continues to retain its craft basis despite efforts to introduce various software engineering processes into development of software. Again, on the other hand, authors have contended that software programming has taken the same route as other manufacturing operations with its splitting up into various small functions capable of being undertaken by the less skilled (Greenbaum 1976). Part of our uncertainty about the effect that information technology has had on the nature of work can be traced back to the considerable uncertainty about the conception of skill. Hence, we can only argue that the introduction of information technology does change the nature and type of skill used in the workplace, but without a shared, operational definition of skill, we have no means of judging if the net effect of computerisation is towards deskilling the workforce.

The impact of IT on employment is not therefore uniform. It can reduce work to deskilled and repetitive jobs and it can also create innovative work and new skills. It can fragment and control labour or it can enable decentralised decision-making and more autonomy. If the workplace is a 'contested terrain' as argued by Edwards, then the direction of change in the organization of work depends on the strength of and organisation of labour as well. This proposition also finds empirical support in a few studies (Clement, 1991; Ormos and Blameble 1989 cited in Ng and Yong 1995). Strong trade union demands coupled with a more open government (e.g. in the Scandinavian countries) can provide channels for participation of labour in planning and use of new technologies.

The impact of the introduction of IT cannot thus be analysed apart from its immediate context of social relations and the existing organisation of work. The extent of impact will also vary depending on the type of machines being installed, the period of installation and the existing labour processes, which are being automated. While studies tend to classify labour into too broad categories like clerical or blue-collared or managerial, differences in terms of impacts can be observed even within these categories, calling for a more nuanced treatment of the subject. Further, given other social bases of segmentation like gender and ethnicity, the impact of ICTs too may differentially affect these categories. For instance, while the new technology skills are being polarised by gender, it is also evident that women are entering computer professions in both the developed and developing countries, leading to class polarisation within the female labour force itself.

This means that deskilling and intensification of work are not inevitable consequences of technological change, but neither will technology automatically create better opportunities. Given the multiplicity of institutional variables that mediate between availability of new technologies and their deployment, impacts are complex and conditioned by relations of power. Studies in fact reveal that the nature of change depends on relative power of the workers. For example, clerks fared less well, on average, than professionals. Again, secretaries sometimes experience better work improvements than workers, primarily women, who were involved in back office processing transactions. Occupational power thus, plays an important role in shaping the way ICTs restructure work content (George and King 1991; Attewell, 1987).

Studies in advanced capitalist economies also point to the skill-biased technical change during a substantial portion of the 20th century, which runs counter to the Marxist contention that technology when deployed in a capitalist society serves to fragment tasks and deskill workers. Some of them also observe a polarisation of the labour market, with a growing bottom-end of low skilled workers as well. Also, some address the measurement of extent of skill bias and its role in the increasing income inequalities witnessed across the globe during the last two decades (Castells 1999). As stated earlier, it needs to be noted that the introduction of ICTs has taken place in conjunction with dismantling of social security nets and greater internationalisation of production to take advantage of low labour costs outside the advanced capitalist economies. Though different methodologies have been developed to net out other effects and isolate the impact of new technologies on skill requirements, there is a consensus by and large that new technologies require complementary skills to ensure their optimum utilisation.

Some of the implications of this are that employees will have many jobs in their work career. They have to move from one job to another as job requirements change, for which they need to constantly update their skill profile according to changing market requirements. Thus, they must be 'trainable' in new skills. This capability depends on possessing a particular educational background; have easier and speedier access to knowledge, which can be codified and disseminated - a major benefit to the LICs. Having said that, it also needs to be understood how traditional forms of labour market based segmentation like that based on gender are undermined or reinforced through use of ICTs.

5.Women's Employment and Diffusion of ICTs

Let us consider the various perspectives that exist concerning possibilities that are open to women in a society whose growth relies heavily on processing and sharing of information. One view perceives technologies in general to be produced by men to serve their interests and reinforcing their domination over women (Cockburn 1986). In this, technologies are seen as tools to perpetuate patriarchal control. This perception has been contested, and of late, by a set of theories that seek to envision a positive role for technologies in liberating women (Plant cited in Millar 1998, 59). They contend that women may benefit from such changes, especially the growing servitisation of economies.

Labelled as cyber feminists, to them the advances in information and communication technologies offer women opportunities to appropriate technologies to liberate themselves from domination exercised by men. Technologies are increasingly becoming self-perpetuating systems wherein production/creation of news ones are carried out more by machines than by men. Men are thus eliminated from the realm of production, confining them to the status of users, along with women. Under such a technological regime, especially one that is characterised by non-hierarchical networked systems, women as users may be more comfortable given their attributes like role-playing, etc. Women can therefore manipulate uses to their advantage. The rise of online communities and networks of women's groups and possibilities of role playing due to the ensured anonymity are all seen as evidence of this potential for new technologies to empower women. In contrast to the earlier perspective that pits technologies against women with little space that can be recovered, and as victims of patriarchal manipulation through technological dominance, this perspective ties technologies to means for women's liberation. Nevertheless, as Millar argues, the extent to which the avenues opened up through new technologies have actually empowered women is not too clear. To add, it speaks little about the vast number of women with little access to such technologies.

In terms of work, to those who envision an enskilled workforce, due to automation of routinised and standardised work tasks, sceptics point to the predominance of women in jobs that are increasingly automated by the new technologies or in low-end jobs created in the new sectors (McDowell 1999;Cockburn 1985), while men occupy the more skilled occupations. This, as Belt, Richardson and Webster (2000) points out, has led to the assertion that labour markets are being dualised or polarised in the new economy. It is in this regard that the nature of women's employment becomes important as they may be confined to the low-end segment of the labour market (Lash and Urry 1994).

Another view held by some, especially that emanating from multilateral agencies for development goes along the following lines (ILO 2001). ICTs are here to stay. Not only are ICT sectors the fastest growing, but their generic nature ensures that they are embedded and diffused across all sectors in the economy, accounting for bulk of productivity increases. In a globalising world, low income countries cannot but avoid 'catching up' on the ICT front, if they are to partake of the benefits of a growing global economy. ICTs, however, do not automatically ensure all round growth and development. Just like other technologies, they also have tendencies to exclude certain segments, while privileging others. This reconfiguration of power relations, history shows, has always tended to marginalize women. Institutions and policies ought to ensure that women are not excluded. For instance, as users, women ought to be provided special incentives to use ICTs in their work as well as in political mobilisation. Also, extra efforts have to be taken by the government to ensure that adequate numbers of women are represented in IT based sectors. This may involve provision of new technology related skills to women entering into the labour market. What this perspective assumes is that technology is an exogenous and neutral variable that can be shaped to benefit women through appropriate intervention. Such an approach fails to recognise the possibility that technology is socially constructed in so much as in production as in consumption.

In each society, as agents encounter and negotiate technology, they simultaneously shape outcomes. Institutions and practices in which agents are embedded in and perpetuate will influence the negotiation and shaping. It therefore becomes important to understand technologies as they are produced, used and how meanings are invested (McDowell 1999). Such a need to situate technological change is completely absent in government policies, both in the advanced capitalist economies and low-income countries. Challenged by declining employment in traditional sectors, governments see in the growing servitisation, especially that is IT-enabled, tremendous scope to compensate job losses. In the US, for instance, cities, where traditional manufacturing sectors have declined, strong local government initiatives are afoot to secure investments in IT-based service sectors that may generate employment (Buchanan and Koch-Schulte 2000). This strategy is also true of new sites that have not been part of the earlier phase of industrialisation, but see in ITES an opportunity to enter into the new IT driven growth phase. A number of towns in Canada, for instance, have adopted this strategy, making the Canadian call centre industry one of the biggest and dynamic ones. That similar strategies are being adopted in low-income economies, especially India should therefore not be surprising.

Given the diverse nature of jobs generated by ICTs, nature of women's employment and work too can be varied. The dynamics of diffusion and use of computer technology are also varied, reflecting the differences in institutional arrangements across different sectors and countries. To begin with, while ICTs have diffused to a great extent in advanced capitalist economies, in low-income economies diffusion of ICTs is a recent phenomenon and more importantly, given the lower relative costs of labour, it has not permeated throughout firms. Women's employment in ICT sectors range from low-skilled, low-paid data entry jobs to high-skilled, high-status professional jobs of systems analysts and computer programmers, though most are concentrated towards the low-skilled end of the spectrum (Mitter and Pearson 1992; Pearson and Mitter 1993). Interestingly, the bulk of women's employment in computer-related occupations across countries has been concerned with the entry and manipulation of data via computer keyboards or in low-skilled assembly jobs in the hardware industry. It needs to be remembered that women's employment even in traditional sectors are confined to data entry jobs like typing or jobs that require soft skills like inter-personal skills, communication skills, etc. Thus jobs like secretarial assistance and public relations promotion were and still are undertaken by largely by women. The predominance of women in similar jobs in ICT sectors therefore is indicative of only continuity in the gendering of work in the 'new economy'.

With the advances in telecommunications technology, there is an increasing trend to relocate or subcontract office services to low-wage countries, where women are employed in low-skilled data entry and other jobs at a fraction of the cost of comparable labour in high-income economies (ILO 2001; Mitter and Rowbotham 1995). Even highly-skilled software services are being undertaken by firms in low-income economies like India with a pool of skilled low cost labour (ILO 2001; Heeks 1996). Apart from such rise of new sectors, use of automation in traditional sectors also portends important changes to labour markets. Thus, the extent to which such trends would affect women's employment in these countries is worthy of examination.

The following review is primarily based in the set of papers in Mitter and Rowbotham (1995). To begin with, Acero delineates the ways in which women employees respond to organisational changes like automation, drive towards more efficiency and importantly quality of output to meet the challenges of global competitive pressures. Interestingly, she finds that women employees understand the need for skill upgradation and demand from management the need for innovations in in-house training systems. To a certain extent, her fndings support the deskilling and degradation of work hypothesis of Braverman, and a possible feminisation of work as a result of changes in technologies. Yet she also finds an opposing trend: new production processes demand a number of high-end skills including technical and managerial expertise for core occupations. The inability of women to find adequate access to these jobs are due to pre-entry barriers to entry into the labour market like social and educational institutions that deter women from upgrading their skills, enforcing segmented labour markets. Her observations that women's position in the intra-household division of labour plays an important role in determining on women's status at work stress the need to have a deeper insight into the links between private and public domains in workers' lives. 'New technology, in reducing the skill components of assembly-line jobs, makes these more accessible to women. Increased job opportunities, however, bring new tensions in workers' domestic lives. The evolving situation in the household poses special challenges to women who take time off in order to organise around their workplace demands, or who take initiatives in family planning.' Increasing entry into paid employment has nevertheless contributed to autonomy for women at work and training possibilities to a limited extent.

Gannage's paper relates the formation of identities with the use of ICTs among the female workforce. She stresses the need to go beyond a pure gender based understanding of labour segmentation and its dynamic to one that combines it with class and ethnicity to understand the changing labour processes in a 'post-industrial' society. Thus, even within women employees, segmentation based on educational qualifications which in turn are partly a reflection of their class status are found to exist and which may in fact, be enhanced in a 'knowledge economy'. Webster (1985) once again observes intra-gender differences in the effects of office automation on women's work. It has led to deskilling in some jobs and removal of routine work in others. She argues that power relations within the firm condition the differential impacts. Jobs with better status and higher in the hierarchy experienced reduction in monotony while those lower down experience deskilling. This contention finds an echo in ILO (2001) and Rothboeck, Vijayabaskar and Gayathri (200). The latter work points to the strong class differences within women employees in the Indian software industry.

Gannage analyses the modes by which use of ICTs in tandem with new corporate strategies to improve quality and time to market alter the careers of immigrant women in Canada. She observes that while there has been a displacement of labour to an extent, it has also led to a polarisation of skills and increase in insecure home-based work. Her observations call for radical reformulation of labour union strategies state policies in the wake of new organisational and labour market changes, like encouragement of skill formation and creation of institutions that undermine discrimination based on gender and ethnicity.

Banerjee relates the employment of women in electronics production in Calcutta to the predominance of the informal economy characterised by insecurity of employment and degraded work conditions. In Calcutta, a number of consumer goods are assembled in informal sector units using imported components and large number of women employees. Assembly jobs, as is well known, does not require much skills and hence poor women with little formal qualifications or training are employed at low wage rates. Interestingly, she observes that this process has enabled some of the employees to acquire skills to help them assemble entire units. Acquisition of such skills definitely opens up opportunities for vertical mobility. Nevertheless, perceptions that women are not good enough for such complex tasks, and lack of formal qualifications to back them up, prevents this skill acquisition from being translated into entrepreneurship and consequent access to higher incomes. Once again, we find that traditional sources of labour market discrimination continue to retain their hold in labour markets in ICT based sectors as well.

This finds additional support from Gaio's analyses of women's employment in the Brazilian software industry. Though this sector employs a large number of women (nearly 50 per cent of the total workforce), a major proportion of them are employed in low-end jobs like data entry and data processing, with women occupying a much lower share in software development work. At the same time, the fact that they have entered into the workforce, their low status notwithstanding implies that ICTs do have the potential to reduce discrimination. Thus, unlike other scholars of the Bravermanian kind who are pessimistic about prospects for women in the context of enhanced use of ICTs, Gaio perceives a few positive signs: "The labour process theory, she argues, gives too much attention to the 'hard' side of technical knowledge, which is amenable to deskilling through Taylorism and automation. The approach fails to note the growing importance of the 'soft' side of technical knowledge, such as communication and user-producer interaction, which enables women to achieve economic advancement and greater social power. The declining importance of mainframe computers, she argues, gives a reason also for revising a certain strand of the radical feminist vision of technology, that thinks primarily in terms of 'hard' machines, embodying male dominance and power." (http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu37we/uu37we03.htm#1. beyond the politics of difference.Introduction )

Pearson, on the other hand, does not envisage better work for women in the new work environment, though she does concede that enhanced work opportunities may lead to more autonomy for women in other spheres. Analysing the work conditions of data-entry workers, she observes that such work poses a number of health hazards like Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) to which women are more susceptible given their predominance in such jobs. More importantly, she points to the problems faced by employees and unions in making such hazards declared as injurious as they do not result in any external injuries. She calls for greater intervention to ensure that women gain some advantages in the new work environment.

To understand the interaction between gender and new information technologies, we posit that we need to not only understand the relationship within the workplace but also in the realm of cultural reproduction. In a traditional low-income society like India with vast presence of technologically backward sectors, entry or familiarity with ICT based sectors can trigger notions of cultural superiority. Backed by a rhetoric of the 'new economy' driven by ICTs as an extremely powerful and inevitable route that economies ought to assume if they are to remain competitive, those with familiarity of the sector tend to perceive themselves to be better placed and more attuned to the world of the future. Such perceptions are not without a material basis. The software sector has not only been one of the fastest growing sectors, but it has also generated a segment of elite income earners, whose intellectual prowess has also put India in the global IT map. Bangalore, for instance, is considered by many to be one of the leading IT hubs if not in the world, at least in Asia. Income from exports also implied that salary levels could be pegged to international levels. In addition to high incomes earned by them the near global mobility of software professionals has rendered the entire sector a cutting edge sector in India. Working in such a sector also means acquiring a globally recognised cultural capital not easily accessible to those outside them. As a result, acquisition of skills to build up such cultural capital becomes an important component of social mobility. Soft skills like communication with a global clientele (read American or British), can easily be deployed outside the workplace to reap the benefits of such social capital. As a result, incentives to work need not necessarily be confined to the monetary sphere. In our analyses, we therefore also seek to understand the way employees perceive work, possible reasons for such an understanding and how such perceptions influence the labour market dynamic.

VI Labour Markets and ICT Diffusion in the Automobile Sector

1. Method
Given the relative lack of interest in the impact of ICTs on labour in India, hardly any data in this regard exists. Further, existing data on the manufacturing and services sector does not provide disaggregated data on ITES segments. Data on the automobile industry do exist, but given the level of aggregation, it is not useful to understand micro-impacts of the kind the study seeks to examine. Empirical data are therefore collected almost exclusively through primary fieldwork. The choice of firms is however made based on available data on their importance to the industry and their relevance for the current study.

In the case of the automobile industry, data were collected so as to seek answers to the following questions.

1. To what extent has information technology been introduced in traditional manufacturing firms in India? (Planning, manufacturing, administration, accounting)?

2. Has the introduction of information technology had any quantitative impact on the level of employment and, if so, on what job profiles?

3. Has information technology had any qualitative effect (e.g., better working conditions, more satisfactory or creative work, and, if so, on what job profiles?

4. What are the major ways of dealing with redundant workers?

5. Has any training been provided to workers to adjust to the new technology?

6. What new skills are required, if any, when recruiting new workers, as the result of introduction of ICTs?

7. How is technology related to the changes in work content and control?

8. Are new opportunities for women's employment being created?

9. What would these require in terms of skills and training patterns?

Given the heterogenity of ICTs, we confine our enquiry largely to the impact on implementation of one type of IT solution, viz., enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for the overall firm operations and on introduction of computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines in the shopfloor.

2. Why ERP?
Among the fastest growing software segments in the Indian domestic market in the last few years are Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. ERP systems have revolutionized global business practices in a wide range of industries, across different scales of operation, by facilitating information flows across various functions within firms, to reduce time-to-market and to promote decentralised decision-making. This has transformed work organization and enabled firms to rationalise their use of labour. Tracking how ERP is used offers an excellent means of comprehending ICT diffusion in the wider economy and to shed light on changes in work patterns and employment as a result of ICT diffusion.

In India, since ERP implementation began around the mid-1990s the manufacturing sector has accounted for nearly 75 per cent of ERP system purchases, with the automobile and automobile component industry being one of the largest consumers. Under India's liberal policy regime since the mid-1980s, the automobile industry has been among the fastest growing manufacturing industries, accompanied by intensified competition as well as a number of product market and technological changes. To quote, "The model of mass production was first invented by Automobile industry a century ago. But now the industry is facing global competition and the needs of the industry have changed totally. The customers are no longer satisfied with few choices. They demand what they want, when they want and where they want. To cater the needs, make-to-order production is necessary instead of mass production. Here the success depends on speed; speed of accepting market requirements, speed of developing new models, speed of procuring raw materials, speed of production and speed of delivering the products to right place. Collaboration among all the industry players -- suppliers, OEMs, dealers, and customers -- is essential." (http://www.karkhanisgroup.com/indusol/autosol.htm)

ICTs consist of various technologies, and in order to obtain a homogenous technology, we confine our analyses largely to implementation of ERP solutions and use of CNCs in the shop floor. However, all the firms studied have implemented ERP only within the last two to three years. As a result, its impacts are difficult to discern. We therefore, through interviews with systems personnel, senior management and human resources personnel, attempt to delineate the possible organisational and labour market changes that may result in future. However, we also observed that all firms had relatively robust legacy systems over which ERP systems have been introduced. The legacy systems too have altered work content and job types considerably. We also examine these changes to capture the impact of ICTs.

ERP solutions are essentially designed to reduce costs and time of transactions, both intra-firm and inter-firm in the case of supplier and distribution firms. Second, it generates considerable amount of information on the various business processes, apart from increasing their availability to all levels in the organisation bringing transparency to the entire organisation. Such transaction reducing effects is supposed to have a 'power effect' as well, that is, it enables management to take more creative and accurate decisions, it helps them to control processes better, and it provides with them with a powerful tool to enforce organisational changes. As can be seen, derivation of benefits from this system requires tremendous support from the workforce not only to meet the new information requirements, but also to put the available information to effective use. It also requires a considerable degree of business process re-engineering (BPR) to ensure the optimal utilisation of human and material resources.
The study is based on primary fieldwork carried out by case studies of select leading automobile firms in India. User respondents are chosen from different levels in the organisational hierarchy and semi-structured interviews will be used to access information. Data has been collected from 80 employees. Relevant firm-level data are also obtained from annual reports, websites, and from production and human resource departments.

To get a better insight, we studied the impact across different functional areas like purchase, quality control, inventory and stores management, production and material planning, R&D, human resources and finance. The major source of information was through semi-structured interviews with employees long associated with the firm, in different departments and at various levels in the organisational hierarchy. In fact, quite a few of the managerial staff had, through vertical mobility, moved up from lower positions like supervisors, etc. Given the low turnover, most employees are employed in the same firm for over 25 to 30 years, rendering this approach quite valid.

The firms studied manufacture a diverse range of components and vehicles. Two of them are leading medium and heavy vehicle manufacturers, of which one of them also manufactures passenger cars. The third firm is one of the largest manufacturers of two-wheelers in India and the fourth one, a subsidiary of a passenger car manufacturer manufactures transmission gears of a wide range for various client firms. All these firms have implemented ERP solutions either home grown or bought packages in recent years. The names of the firms studied have been withheld as desired by the management of respective firms.

In the course of our pilot fieldwork, we observed that organisations have undergone considerable restructuring in recent years, preceding as well as following implementation of ERP solutions. As a result, we found that discerning changes solely due to ICT introduction was not only difficult but more importantly, fail methodologically as it does not help us to grasp the ways in which technologies are actually introduced and shape labour markets. Technologies are not introduced in a vacuum, but are shaped even as they are introduced by various institutions within a firm, and external conditions like product markets and policy regimes. Also, the fact that implementation of ERP solutions is very recent, its impacts tend to be noticed only in the future. Hence, we shall develop an analytical narrative of the changes taking place in the labour market as a result of organisational restructuring facilitated by use of ICTs.

3. Evidence from the Indian Auto Industry

Impacts may be quantitative or qualitative. By the former, we refer to reduction in certain types of jobs and/or an increase in certain job types. In our study, we do not capture the exact magnitudes given the long periods of IT use in all the firms studied and the various organisational restructuring undertaken by all these firms independent of IT use. In fact, we would argue that institutions play an equally if not, more important role in this regard. Our emphasis would however be more on the latter dimension, ie, on qualitative impacts like changes in skill profile, employment contracts, work conditions and scope for meaningful work. As can be seen, the issue of job quality is very much related to the notion of 'decent work' developed by the ILO in an effort to create globally uniform basic labour standards in an era marked by rapid global movement of productive capital.

a) Quantitative Impact on Jobs
There are two distinct processes, but related by deployment of ICTs. One is redundancy of blue-collared workers through automation. In all the four firms studied, there has been considerable reduction in the number of blue-collared workers over time. However, this is a broad category, and conceals as it does, a range of differences within them, like that between the skilled, semi-skilled and the unskilled, and between supervisors/foremen and operators and machine tenders. However, in terms of reductions, it has been more or less uniform. While there are variations across firms, partly due to differing growth prospects and market conditions, the deployment of computer numerically controlled machine tools (CNCs) and robots, has led to reduction in the number of operators required on the one hand, and a shift in job type from one of an operator to that of a machine tender. However, in older plants, ordinary machine tools continue to be used along with CNCs. The reduction in the number of operators is not however due to use of CNCs alone. Respondents relate it to work reorganisations like cellular/modular manufacturing that allows them to tend to 5 to six machines per person unlike the earlier one machine per person.

Given the security of employment enjoyed by workforce in the Indian organised sector, this reduction has been achieved by a freeze in recruitment of operators (ITI trained) and non-replacement of employees retiring or leaving the firm. Also, attractive voluntary retirement schemes (VRS) have been introduced recently in two of the firms studied. In one of these firms, over 1000 employees of the 13,00 odd workforce has opted for this scheme within the past two years. Interestingly, product markets for both these firms have maintained a rather sluggish growth in the last two years rendering such schemes viable to management. On the other hand, in another case firm, catering to the vibrant two-wheeler market, management has been able to redeploy the redundant workforce. As the vice-president of the firm says, "There has been a shift from data processing to management and some jobs have becomes redundant, but the two-wheeler industry is growing so rapidly that it will be possible to re-deploy all the people."(http://www.tvsmotor.co.in/prdetail.asp?pressid=6)

The decline in the requirements of skilled operators in the shopfloor is best exemplified in the case of one of the firms that has a nearly 50 year old medium and heavy vehicle manufacturing plant and a five year old car manufacturing plant. While the former relies heavily on manual labour, the latter engages a large number of robots for most shopfloor operations like assembly, painting, etc. Highly skilled technicians and engineers monitor the functioning of the robots. The HR manager opines that the labour productivity in the car plant is at least four times that of the other plant. Again, secondary sources indicate that the new plants that have been set up by MNCs in the 1990s employ far fewer blue-collared workforce due to adoption of high levels of automation (www.fordindia.com). The ratio of blue collared workforce to white collared workers in the new firms is 1:2 compared to the 1:2.5 ratio that exists in older firms in India.

Among the white-collared work force, use of ICTs in the automobile industry has led to reduced need for jobs in most areas like documentation, inter-departmental communication, data processing and similar clerical work apart from losses due to automation in the shopfloor. In all the firms, in most departments, there has been a reduction in the number of staff. In terms of levels, there has been a marginal decline in middle management level, considerably more in lower management levels and maximum among clerical staff. It must be reiterated that in this case, the redundancy is primarily an outcome of use of ICTs in the organisation. The managerial and clerical staff has declined by 10 to 15 per cent in the last five years in all the firms studied. Department specific information, in two of the firms studied proved to be difficult, as they had undergone considerable restructuring of departments recently rendering collation of such data difficult.

In the other two firms, a number of changes are cited by respondents. For instance, in one firm, in the Goods Received and Despatched division (called GR&D), the number employed has come down from 12 to 4 between 1997-98 and May 2002. The functions here essentially involve ensuring that the ordered quantities of components and supplies have been sent, documentation of bought out components reaching the factory, and its movement to the stores to be taken out during production. With the introduction of online tracking system, this process has been considerably simplified.

Many such data entry and data communications jobs have witnessed reductions in all departments. As for categories, there is a set of employees called 'Monthly Rated' workers or 'chasers', who belong to the unionised segment, but are paid on a monthly basis unlike the rest who are paid on a per-shift basis. They are low-skilled workers employed in data entry, following up on movement of goods and documents from and to various sections, and also ensure transmission of documents containing relevant information within the firm. Thus, essentially, they are involved in ensuring proper transactions within the firm to co-ordinate production. ERP systems and even the earlier legacy systems have undermined their need considerably.

Similarly, a number of employees were engaged in the purchase department to liaison with suppliers, answer their queries, follow up on orders placed, ensure payments, etc. Now with the on-line networking of suppliers, quite a few of these jobs have been made redundant. One of them who continues to work in the purchase division has this to say: "Earlier, there used to be three of us here and all we did was answer calls from suppliers most of the day. But now, I am the only one here and I may attend just 5 to 10 calls a day." Suppliers now can look up the website to check the status of their bill processing and payments. Only under exceptional circumstances do they have the need to call up the purchase department for queries. In the entire division, there used to be 20 to 25 personnel earlier. At present, there are only six employees. The same is true of the 'bill passing' function in the finance department. In one firm, respondents in this division report a decline from 12 to 6 in the last four years, and they attribute it to the new software systems completely. However, this reduced need has not resulted in lay-off of employees due to strong institutional protection to employees in these firms. Excess staff are redeployed elsewhere to improve the efficiency of other processes. Different firms, depending upon their growth, product market conditions and management, rely on different strategies to offset the changing labour requirements.

On the other hand, there are a few functional areas/departments where there has been increased employment in recent years, indicating a possible complementarity of employment with use of ICTs. Systems department is obviously one. Its strength in one firm has increased from 11 to 20 in the last three years and from 20 to nearly 50 in another. Apart from direct employment, firms also get IT professionals from IT firms on a temporary basis for implementation or consultancy in IT related areas. The other departments that have witnessed increased employment are quality, R&D and sales and marketing divisions. This phenomenon is a direct outcome of the imperatives of global competition and not due to use of ICTs. In sum, however, as can be seen, there has been a net reduction in labour absorption, which is likely to continue in the years to come.

b) Changes in Skill Requirements
Here again, we differentiate the technical from administrative and managerial workforce. On the shop floor, with the use of CNCs, there has been a shift from operative skills to machine tending skills. There has thus been more emphasis on cognitive and problem-solving skills and less on technical skills at this level. It has also undermined the need for their technical skills like welding, turning, machining, etc. Instead, it requires them to watch out for faulty work and fix them. While operators are trained to fix standard errors, more complex ones are handled by the machinery suppliers. Interestingly, there are differences in the extent to which use of CNCs imparts new cognitive skills to users. In one case firm, programming was done by a few of the trained operators themselves. They had working knowledge of computers and then they were taught to program these machines. This, as can be seen, is definitely a case of users requiring a shift from technical to cognitive skills as has pointed out by others. On the other hand, in the other firm, a professional from the supplier firm programmes the machines periodically and hence, there is a clear process of deskilling. Even in the former case, not all the erstwhile machine operators are trained in programming, indicating the tendency of ICTs to polarise skills.

Simultaneously, with the introduction of new management techniques, emphasis has been placed on multi-skilling. Multi-tasking has happened in three of the firms studied though it is due to new organisational changes rather than use of ICTs. Thus, the 'organisational imperative' rather than the 'technological imperative' has led to this skill bias. Workers are encouraged through appropriate incentives, and in two firms are compulsorily made to learn new skills other than their current specialisation. There are variations across different segments of workers. Unskilled workers are asked to take up other unskilled tasks in other departments, which in effect means that there is no skill upgradation. As for the skilled and the semi-skilled, they are encouraged to deepen their current skills as well as learn other tasks. For instance, a welder can be trained to operate a computerised welding machine as well as in other skills like painting or machining. It is in the multi-skilling aspect that greater emphasis is given as it is not possible at present for firms to benefit from skill deepening due to increased automation. Also, multi-skilling ensures functional flexibility among the workforce, critical to cater to flexible product market conditions. Workers also participate in cost saving and quality enhancement measures, once again due to competitive pressures. Also, efforts are underway to delegate more supervisory functions to the senior operators themselves. However, the process of skill acquisition in the shop floor, as we shall see later, is not entirely a step towards greater control over work among the blue collared workers.

Among the white-collared workforce, low-level skills like data entry, and clerical skills like bill passing and document preparation have been made redundant. On the other hand, there has been an increase in need for skilled professionals like IT workers and design staff. Managers are also required to move across departments to develop a comprehensive understanding of the business processes in two of the firms studied. Control functions of managers have been made easier while also requiring them to use greater cognitive skills to interpret and take decisions based on information generated through management information systems. The new skill requirements like that required in the systems department are by and large met through employment of a different set of people in most cases, with higher formal qualifications as compared to those whose skills are made redundant. There are thus indications of skill polarisation in the Indian auto industry.

c) Changes in Work content:
We already noted the shifting emphasis on cognitive skills among the technical workers in the shopfloor. Also, given the reduced time required for machine tending, senior operators are also asked to take up a few supervisory functions as well. Inputting of data into the system requires certain amount of data entry work from the operators at the shop floor, which was not welcome initially. It required some negotiation before it could be ensured.

Among the administrative jobs, the most important change brought about by use of ICTs has been the increased speed and hence the reduced time to carry out many tasks. Before the advent of computers, everything had to be tabulated and calculated manually to arrive at final requirements. Further, they needed to go to each of the departments to get the required information. At the shop floor too, chasers were employed to find out how much of material has been processed, how much has been pending, etc. This data has to be then noted down, and then used to arrive at future requirements. With the advent of computers, need for manual calculation has been eliminated, which reduces time enormously. However, inter-departmental coordination still meant sending people with printouts. Then all of the documents have to be related to one another and then requirements planned. With implementation of ERP systems, all these functions have been considerably simplified. Inter-departmental movement of documents has more or less ceased.

Inventory control has been made easier now, and data entry in this department is done much faster than before. A respondent employed in this job for a long time says "Earlier, we used to work as a group. Now I do this all by myself. The others, either they have retired or they have been moved into other departments. For me, there is not much difference in the kind of work that I do. Earlier, I used to do write or note down on paper manually, but now I enter it into the machine and the machine generates whatever documents are required. But now since work gets done faster, I can handle the entire stores. But I can't say that it has benefitted me personally though it is a big advantage for the firm". It has definitely benefited firms, as there has been steady decline in inventory held in all the firms studied. For instance, in one firm, work in progress has come down by almost 50 per cent, from Rs. 180 crores to Rs. 100 crores in three years.

Planning functions too have been made easier. This has enabled firms' managers to engage in more complex planning than what was done earlier. To cite, in all firms except one, production planning has moved from a monthly plan to weekly plan and of late to a daily plan. In other words, the organisation is able to react to demand changes much quickly as compared to the earlier period. As the manager of production planning reported, "To draw up a production plan for one vehicle, it used to take me between 20 to 30 minutes. Now I can do it in 2 seconds"! The main function of the department is one of planning and control. Now because of implementation of ERP, control functions have been taken out of their domain as it enables them to coordinate between various departments without much effort. Similarly, in another firm, a manager in the material planning division said that while earlier, it will take an entire night to get the requirements and plan, later on in the legacy system, it used to take four to six hours. "Now it takes only two to three hours."

The Bill of Materials (BOM) forms the base document for material planning, costing and generation of purchase orders. Preparation of BOM is a complex and very critical task, and given the lack of accurate department specific information, it was very difficult to come up with an accurate figure that reflects actual costs across departments. ERP systems, when used effectively, can sort out this major plan process. In all the firms studied, respondents among senior management opine that the BOM is more accurate and easier to get now, enabling them to work with accurate information for more micro-level planning.

d) Changes in Mobility
Among the blue-collared workers, a traditional career path has been to move into supervisory levels based on time-based mobility. Of late, the number of these positions has come down, as ERP systems reduce the labour requirements for monitoring. As stated earlier, senior operators are trained to take on a supervisory role in addition to their existing operative responsibilities. Definitely, this process has led to development of multiple skills, while at the same time, curtailing career paths, as they were earlier. Thus, what we witness here is a transformation of career paths. Increasingly mobility is tied to acquisition of new skills as opposed to the time-based paths in vogue earlier.

Among the white-collared workforce, time based mobility continues to exist in addition to inter-departmental movement of managerial staff. None of the respondents in this category felt that there have been changes in this regard due to use of ICTs, though all human resource heads agree upon the slight reduction in positions as well as increase in this tendency in the years to come. This is partly due to the rapid turnover among graduate engineers, who are employed at the lowest levels in the managerial category. This turnover is a result of the boom in the software sector and the attendant high salaries. Hence, employees continuing to work in this firm are able to move along traditional career paths. One change has been the movement of some staff to the systems department due to acquisition of IT-related skills as well as to provide domain knowledge to aid systems development. The hollowing-out due to reduced need for middle management has not happened for reasons cited earlier. However, organisations will seek to reduce manpower employed as ERP systems definitely enable removal of many routine functions of management.

Employment contracts have not changed in any of the firms studied. The only change in this regard is the reduction in absorption of trainees (ITI) into permanent employees due to the declining need for blue-collared workforce. There has also been a shift to use of temporary workers for carrying out unskilled maintenance jobs, which of course cannot be attributed to ICTs.

e) Impact on Work Autonomy
ICTs through provision of transparency and easy access to information can enable employees to participate in decision-making and therefore reduce hierarchical authority. On the other hand, it provides management with a powerful tool to exercise greater control over employees' work. We find little evidence of the former possibility among the case firms. Though new management techniques encourage workers' participation in decision-making, this has been confined to areas like cost reductions on the shopfloor or in quality control through formation of quality circles. Empowering them by enabling them to take decisions based on increased information availability has not happened, though once again, HR heads claim to introduce such changes in the future.

ERP systems provide a powerful tool to control the pace of work even in the shopfloor aas well as concentrate power and authority among the top management. In ERP systems, the work process control in the shop floor is designed in such a way that in case of bottlenecks in the flow of production process, it is possible to identify a particular point or person where it has come to a halt. As one production manager said, "Earlier the shop floor used to be a black box. It will take us a day to find out why the scheduled output has not come out of the assembly line. As a result, we hardly ever bothered to find out unless when the delays were excessively long. But now, it is possible to even set a trigger to go off if a particular task is not carried out within a standard time frame. It definitely offers the scope to exercise control on the shopfloor, but we haven't tried it as it may not be welcome among the workers…. Ideally, it should be possible for us to fix an average time for a specific task and introduce disincentives to prevent workers from overshooting the time limit. But we are still in an era when trade unions can stop work if they want to". It goes to show that possibilities that exist technically can be subverted by strong labour organisation, a phenomenon suggested by industrial sociologists who depict the workplace as a site of contestation between labour and capital.

Another important advantage suggested was its usefulness in effective decision-making. Earlier, the manager had to rely on statements made by lower level management staff to arrive at solutions to problems. At present, he feels that he is able to get the information required to troubleshoot from the information system itself. Moreover, his reduced dependence on subordinates for such information means that he has greater control over allocation of tasks during his work-time. More importantly, ERP solutions have introduced transparency in the organisation with more accurate information available to employees at all levels. The extent to which this transparency has improved the effectiveness of processes is yet to be realised. It also goes to show that the possibility of using the ease of information availability to decentralise decision-making has not been attempted in any of the firms. Many manager respondents do not even have such plans as they are of the opinion that subordinates are not capable of taking up such responsibilities.

f) Impact on Firm Size
In India, even before new market conditions can encourage greater outsourcing, the auto industry has been characterised by high levels of outsourcing due to government policy of reservation of production of some of the components for the small-scale sector (SSI) (Okado 2000; Humphrey 1998). While this has reduced the ability of firms to benefit from vertical integration, firms have also been forced to integrate uneconomical segments of the production process due to lack of competence among the supplier firms in India. Nevertheless, the levels of sub-contracting in all the firms studied were as high as 60 to 70 per cent. Use of ICTs has really not led to changes in these levels. While this is partly attributed to lack of adequate diffusion of IT use among the supplier firms especially those in tier 2 and below, the primary factor has been the growing requirements of quality, wrought about by global competition and the need to comply with global standards. Since firms are unsure of the reliability of quality levels among most of its suppliers, they prefer to retain such operations in-house. Even given such a possibility, firms have to reckon with labour redundancy within their firms. Thus, as can be seen, a purely transaction cost based explanation in inadequate to understand the impact of ICTs on firm size and structure.

It must however be stated that management in all the firms studied are keen to move to outsourcing some of the components if quality suppliers are available. While the growing demands on quality has led to working with some of the first tier suppliers to ensure required standards, it has also forced some of the larger, established tier 1 suppliers to get global quality certifications.

g) Changes in Organisational Form
Though three of the firms studied have undertaken considerable business process re-engineering prior to implementation of ERP systems, no dramatic change in organisational structure has been reported so far. Changes have largely been by way of combining functions that were done by separate staff earlier, and less reliance on subordinates for access to information for decision-making. Given the lack of codification of business processes and procedures, in all the firms studied, the possibility of disintermediation, ie, removal or decline in size of middle management in the near future is remote. Employees' resistance to such changes is partly cited as a factor, as any kind of resentment may lead to reduced effectiveness of the firm to take advantage of existing systems. Apart from reduction in numbers employed in certain levels like supervisors and clerical staff, no change is reported by any of the firms. On the shopfloor, even redeployment of workers from one shop floor like the one for vehicles to another for engines was not too welcome in the initial phases. However, management feels that it might be required in future if full benefits are to be reaped. It appears that the ability of ICTs to create flatter organisations has been nullified due to power exercised by the white-collared workforce, including those occupying middle management levels. Respondents in the latter category, in general, are of the strong opinion that given the highly uncertain business environment in India and lack of codification of processes, they will continue to be needed by firms for day to day management.

h) ICTs and Labour Institutions
While labour unions that are relatively strong exist in all the firms, its relationship with management has transformed from a confrontationist one to that of a collaborative one in the last 4-5 years. Increasingly, unions realise that the changed market environment makes tremendous demands, failure to respond to which will negatively impact labour as well. Union officials perceive the pervasive use of ICTs to be an inevitability that would lead to job losses. However, since labour in the organised sector is well protected from lay-offs due to any possible redundancies, unions have invested their energies in getting better terms for employees opting for voluntary retirement schemes that are offered by all the firms studied. Also, performance based incentive schemes that are productivity linked have been allowed by them to enable firms to cope with product market changes.

The evidence undermines the general belief that trade unions are a hindrance to effective use of new technologies. In fact, in many instances, management has used TUs to enlist the cooperation of the workforce in their restructuring attempts. This seems to support the findings of other studies that find a positive relationship between trade union presence and a firm's ability to adopt new technologies effectively. Interestingly, in one firm, installation of computers on the shop floor had some positive externalities according to a senior manager. In September 2001, when there was some unrest among the workers, there was no work for a few days. Usually under such circumstances, workers would damage some machines, and when work resumed maintenance staff would have considerable work to do. However, this time since they were keen to play games on the computer, the machines were hardly damaged! Also, questions about resistance to installation of computers, in all the firms, were met with similar answers that invoke acquaintance with computers as a symbol of elite consumption. To cite one response, "They are happy to have a computer in front of them. Their children learn computers at school and so they are proud to acknowledge that they too know how to use them". ICTs, with their uses of consumption, appear to have reduced resistance to its any perceived negative effects in the realm of production. Management too appears to use that symbolic value of computers to elicit consent to its deployment in the workplace. At least in two firms, respondents do report that they overlook when employees use computers to play games, etc as they felt that it offered them scope to use it for organisational purposes as well.

i. Implications
Firms, by and large, are yet to utilise ICTs optimally in the Indian automobile industry and to that extent, the impacts are yet to be realised. The relatively recent adoption of ICTs is one factor. More importantly, it is only of late that the imperatives of global competition with its reduced time-to-market, flexibility and quality requirements are forcing firms to use ICTs effectively. Certain unambiguous tendencies can however, be observed that have important implications for labour market intervention in traditional manufacturing sectors in India.

An important component of public policy in India with regard to labour market has been the high employment security guaranteed to the formal sector employees. It has been suggested of late that such protection and presence of strong trade unions prevents firms from adopting new technologies and efficient utilisation of human resources. Our observations contradict such positions and in fact indicate the facilitative role played by trade unions in implementation of ICT based technologies. Also, unlike other countries, imperatives of globalisation and new technologies have not led to drastic reduction in employment. While, there is a declining trend as far as employment absorption is concerned, it has not led to lay-off of personnel employed. Instead, it has forced firms to re-deploy a segment of the labour force in redundant jobs involving transaction-processing in jobs where complexities have increased like quality and cost control, not to speak of design and domain support to information systems implementation.

This process has led to skill up gradation among some sections of that redeployed workforce. It can even be tentatively argued that employment protection has aided the firms to move towards quality enhancement rather than cost reduction through retrenchment. The extent to which this re-deployment has taken place varies according to market conditions. It is more observed in firms operating under buoyant market conditions. The skill levels of employees and more importantly on the ability to acquire marketable skills play an important role. Employees with IT-related and cognitive skills are more likely to be re-deployed.

As a result, there is a tendency towards skill polarisation, as only those with an ability to acquire such skills have better growth prospects within a firm. Increasingly, firms will tend to recruit personnel with better managerial and research training than labour with just technical skills. At the macro-level, it therefore appears that there is a steady decline in skills provided by traditional vocational training institutions like Industrial Training Institutes (ITI). Further, with the reduced numbers required for monitoring work, mobility prospects are likely to be reduced. However, in most of the firms studied, appropriate incentive schemes are in place to enable employees to acquire the requisite new IT and managerial skills.

The marginal presence of women employees in the auto industry implies that ICT diffusion in traditional manufacturing may not affect them significantly. Interestingly, in one of the case firms, a senior manager proudly remarked "We are a 100 per cent male company". Nonetheless, with the expansion in systems department, a small but growing number of women professionals are employed in the case firms. The growth in importance of sales and marketing functions has also contributed to this process. Differences in mobility prospects within these departments are not clear, though in none of the firms studied, women professionals are employed in top managerial positions. Also, we find that in some of the new firms, firm-level governance has led them to employ more women workers than the industry norm. Barriers to women's employment appears to be more due to notions of what constitutes women's work. There are nevertheless intra-gender differences in accessing IT-enabled jobs due to differences in skill levels and formal education.

Interestingly, ICTs have not led to greater outsourcing and hence smaller firm size in India. The growing emphasis on quality and low competence levels in this regard among vendor firms prevents firms from relying in greater outsourcing. Thus, while cost cutting pressures and need for scope economies push firms to outsourcing, need for enhanced quality restricts firms from such outsourcing. A pure transaction cost based explanation is thus inadequate to understand the effects of use of ICTs on organisational restructuring. Disintermediation too has not happened to the extent anticipated by literature, largely due to the tacit procedures followed by firms to date. With more and more firms opting for globally recognised quality standards, including that for business processes, we may witness such trends in the future. Nevertheless, as studies suggest, employees in positions of power in the organisational hierarchy may resist moves that reduce the power of their positions. It may well be possible that in the Indian automobile industry, entrenched higher level employees may not allow for undermining of their power.

ICTs repose enormous power with top management to exercise control over activities of the firm at all levels. Easier access to information at all levels also offers the potential to decentralise decision-making power and thereby enhance the autonomy of labour. Even if the latter possibility were to be realised, whether it would mean scope for more meaningful work is not clear, when we bear in mind the increased pressures on time to market and the need to adapt rapidly to changing market conditions. Such work conditions are only beginning to be visible in the Indian manufacturing sector. Thus, the impacts on work and employment appear to be crucially determined by product market imperatives. ICTs do enable such changes, but also provide scope for labour to negotiate changes in ways that may be beneficial to them.

VII Employment and Work in the Indian ITES Sector

1. Significance of ITES Sector
The call centre is seen as a forerunner of what is anticipated to be a fast growing sector, services enabled by information and communication technologies (ITES). IT enables a number of services that were earlier tied to specific locations to be dispersed globally to disparate sites, adding them to the growing list of globally footloose sectors. The growth spurt for this sector stems from two features of late capitalist accumulation; one, the growing servitisaton of economies, and two, competition between firms through provision of quality services both by producers and retailers. Call centres act as an interface between the producer and the consumer either through attending to routine service related queries or act as remote selling agents. Hence, they are also termed as contact centres or customer interaction centres.

Given the link between call centre services and competition through service provision, the quality of services becomes important. This has led to improvements in technology used by CCs with a view to cut costs as well as to improve quality. Cost cutting is accomplished by reducing labour costs through introduction of automated call routing systems and automated voice response systems. Another trend involves deploying cheaper labour. With advances in ICTs, agents located in different parts of the globe can attend to calls from customers located elsewhere. It is this trend that has made India a relatively favourable destination for firms in the advanced capitalist economies to locate their call centres. Low cost, educated labour, capable of being trained to converse in English, American and British, proves to be an attractive factor. While cheap labour may be found elsewhere, it is the knowledge of English language that has been a prime factor. Interestingly, in this regard, there are wide variations even within India. Education in English is confined to the urban and semi-urban segments, with the quality much better in the former regions. As a result, the labour force is drawn mostly from a few big cities. This concentration of labour resources coupled with availability of communications infrastructure in these cities have made them the growth centres of ITES, call centres and others, in India. At present, there are roughly seven major centres of ITES, most of which are located in bastions of traditional industrialising centres like Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad. Kochi, with one of the best infrastructural facilities for data communication, but with hardly any comparable manufacturing base, is also poised to compete with the other major centres.

The recent moves to reduce telecommunications costs and open up markets for investment from VC firms has spawned a number of ITES firms in India. Early evidence from NASSCOM points to its growth potential. From a revenues in Rs 24 billion in 1999-2000, it has increased to Rs. 117 billion in 2002-2003 (http://www.nasscom.org/artdisplay.asp?cat_id=325); so much so that the recent downturn or stagnation in software service exports has been partly compensated by the surge in exports of ITES. Its share in total exports of IT services has increased from 14 per cent in 1999-2000 to 24 per cent in 2002-03. That this trend is going to be a long-term phenomenon is stressed by many industry experts (http://www.nasscom.org/artdisplay.asp?cat_id=325). The recent diversification of some of the bigger software service firms into ITES, either by way of acquisition of existing ITES firms or start-up of subsidiaries once again points to the potential growth and income envisaged in this segment (http://www.nasscom.org/artdisplay.asp?cat_id=325; Chengappa and Goyal 2002).

In India, the growth of ITES was dominated by medical transcription in the initial phases, only to be replaced by call centres as the major type of ITES, and of late by back office processing work. Medical transcription essentially involves transcribing audio medical records of doctors in the US into a written, retrievable format and sending it via satellite to the client firms. While this service continues to be provided, industry experts claim that this segment has been stagnating due to various factors, quality of service delivered being important among them. Earlier, it was seen as a major employer, and led to the rise of a number of training firms offering certificate courses in MT. The last two years has however witnessed the mushrooming of call centres. Initial impetus came from GE's decision to set up a large call centre to take care of its clientele in Noida, Delhi. Subsequent to its success, a number of firms have come up in the other major cities as well. Industry experts are however of the opinion that this sector may not spread as much as policy makers seeking to promote diffused employment desire. Back office processing is seen as a better sector in this regard. Since it does not require voice interaction, those with a good knowledge of English irrespective of their communication or interaction skills have a better chance of being employed in this sector. Though infrastructure availability restricts the sector to the same centres mentioned above, it is expected to diffuse once such constraints are removed. Given the nascent stage of the industry, hardly any data exist on the size of the industry or the numbers it employs, rendering primary data collection, a key component of the study.

2.Method
Though our primary focus in this study is on call centres, we also cursorily examine the work and employment conditions in two other major ITES segments in India, the medical transcription segment (MT hereafter) and back office processing (BOP herafter) segment. Given the issue under exploration, call centres in India too can be of different types. To begin with, they may cater to domestic or foreign firms, the latter implying that revenues are in terms of export earnings. At another level of disaggregation, firms, especially bigger firms, may have their in-house call centres that cater exclusively to their needs. Or else, there are third party vendors that are owned by others but cater to one or more firms. Last, the domain of services provided may also differentiate firms. For instance, there are firms that specialise in financial and banking services, while there are others that specialise in technical support like hardware or telecom services. The latter classification also carries within it, a differentiation based on skill requirements. Some domains, like banking services do not require as much skilled labour as compared to say firms providing technical support to hardware firms. In this regard, a recent but important trend is the growth of R&D services, as firms exploit the availability of low cost high end skills in low income countries like India to provide services that feed into R&D activities of firms in advanced capitalist economies. Apart from export oriented firms, there are also ones serving large domestic firms. These are however, primarily in-house.

Our case firms consisted of one medical transcription firm, four call centres and one back office processing firm. This distribution does not correspond to their distribution in terms of numbers or revenues generated. The reason being that given the time frame, these were the only firms that could be accessed for data collection. Fieldwork proved to be extremely difficult. In many cases, managers in firms stated that allowing of data collection would undermine the secrecy clause that they enter into with client firms. Despite suggestions to the effect that only information that is not deemed confidential will be collated, we were denied access. Another constraint cited was the time taken off the telephone that may reduce efficiency of the employees. In fact, one firm allowed us to talk to employees only during their lunch or tea-break, or as they were leaving work. Another factor that key informants hint at is the possibility of lack of interest in disclosing hiring and employing practices of firms or information about employees given the high labour turnover in the industry.

Apart from interviews with employees, in-depth interviews were conducted with key informants with a long degree of association in the industry. They include HR heads, recruitment consultants, trainers and those involved in starting-up of ITES firms. In total, 60 employees were interviewed with roughly 10 from each firm. Our initial proposal to conduct a sample survey of 150 workers has been stalled at present. However, within the 60 interviewed, we chose 15 employees to do in-depth case studies of their work and life histories and their perceptions of how work in such firms are constructed. Answers to questions were taken as leads to elicit more information about their emotional relationship with work, and the role that this work plays in the overall context of their notions of a successful career and life. Importantly, we sought to locate this work as a moment in the cycle of production-reproduction, including its contribution to identity forging in the realm of consumption.

Within the four call centre firms taken up for case study, all except one are third party firm, ie, they cater to a set of clients. The fourth one is an in-house one set up by a large, domestic provider of mobile telephony services. Of the 60, while 50 were chosen in random, the remaining 10 were chosen purposively to ensure that all levels in the organisation are represented. The reasons are as follows. Call centres are relatively flat organisations with few levels in the organisational hierarchy. At the same time, employees are distributed among the levels in a highly skewed manner, with most of them occupying the lower rung, termed as agents or associates. A regular structure will be as follows.

Since agents account for nearly 90 percent of the workforce, most employees interviewed were agents. As a result, there were hardly any responses from employees from higher levels. Since one component of the study is aimed at understanding the mobility prospects, especially for women workers, we purposively chose employees at higher levels, especially women employees to capture this dimension. We therefore studied five team leaders, two voice coaches and three support employees at the managerial level. The small size of sample employees is partly compensated by interviews with key informants. Secondary literature pertaining to ITES industry in India is confined mostly to newspaper reports and articles in business and trade journals. NASSCOM furnishes data on the magnitude of the industry, which has been used to draw a macro-portrait of the industry.

Throughout the discussion on various aspects of labour use, we draw upon inter-firm differences in practices and seek to relate it to either differences in the services provided or the markets served. It must be remembered that we have confined our study only to the low-end segment of the ITES sector. In high-end services, conditions of work, especially remuneration and skill requirements may be quite different from that depicted here. However, it is the low-end segment that has the potential to generate diffused employment on a much larger scale and hence, important from the point of view of employment generation. It is this segment that can employ the less skilled, a trait that characterises most of the unemployed and underemployed in India.

3. Understanding Work and employment in Indian ITES Sector

To begin with, we focus on the demographic profile of the workforce and the reasons for the dominance of a particular segment of employable workers.

a) Demographic Profile
55 per cent of the 50 workers chosen at random are women with only minor variations in the proportion across firms. In only one domestic call centre, women accounted for nearly 75 per cent of the total workforce, whereas in another international one, according to the HR head, women account for only 50 per cent of the total workforce. Be that as it may, the more interesting factor to be considered is that this ratio is less compared to that found elsewhere. Studies undertaken in Europe and Canada reveal that women account for a slightly larger proportion of the workforce (70-72 per cent in Canada according to Buchanan and Koch-Schulte 2000, v; 70 per cent in Europe according to Belt, Richardson and Webster 2000a, 4). Thus, while as compared to other sectors, this sector does employ a larger share of women in India, their representation when compared to other countries appears to be less. Given the scope of our study, we can only offer an intuitive explanation for this phenomenon. Lack of employment opportunities or a possible decline in absorption in other sectors may push men too to compete for jobs in this sector.

Another distinct demographic feature of the workforce is its age. The average age of the sample workforce is only 22 years. The relatively nascent stage of the sector is probably the major factor behind this dominance of young employees. The oldest firm studied being not more than 3-4 years old, most employees are inexperienced with a maximum of 3 years of work experience. Even employees at higher levels in the organisation have work experience outside this sector and have entered only recently. Here again, we observe that compared to the age profile elsewhere, it is marginally lower in India. Probably, the fact that the industry is much older in the advanced capitalist economies may be one possible explanation. Among the sample workforce, there were 8 employees who are in the 28-35 age group, whereas 15 of them are in the 17-21 age group. Primarily, employees in the medical transcription firm studied constituted the former segment. We find that there are quite a few employees in this firm with a few years of experience either as in pharmaceuticals or in medical professions. In the call centre case firms, however, there were only 5 employees in that age group out of the total 40 interviewed. No sex-wise differences in the age profile can be discerned.

The younger age profile also implies that most of them are unmarried. In fact, out of the 50 interviewed in random, only four women and two men were married and another one widowed. Interestingly, time and again throughout our interviews, a recurrent note on marriage being a hindrance factor to work in this sector came up among the women employees. To men, however, marriage does not seem to restrict continued employment in this sector. Even among the 10 senior employees who were purposively chosen for our study, 7 were unmarried. Two of the remaining three who are married are women.

The next important characteristic of the workforce is the income groups their families belong to. All the employees interviewed but for a couple of them in the domestic call centre, hail from middle and upper middle income brackets. We acquired this information from the question on parental occupation. Further, when we visited employees in their homes, observations on their neighbourhoods were used to reinforce the survey information. Invariably, parents are employed in professional occupations either in the government or private corporate sector. Interestingly, we found that in Bangalore, quite a few employees' father was/is employed in the defence sector. All parents are/were employed in the organised sector, a sector that accounts for only seven per cent of all employment in the economy.

The last but nevertheless an important characteristic of the workforce is its urban-centredness. All the employees hail from urban areas, metropolitan in fact in most cases. Only in the domestic call centre, we found a few employees hailing from non-metropolitan but big cities. The sourcing also tends to be localised. For instance, ITES firms in Bangalore employed mostly employees with their families settled in Bangalore, just as employees hailing from Chennai dominated firms in Chennai.

Weaving these aspects together, a few observations stand out. One, despite the purported vision of creating more diffused and broad-based employment compared to software services, for a less-skilled workforce, we find that employment is confined to urban elites hailing from metropolitan areas. Its employment creation potential for women is therefore not even. Only women employees from a high income, metropolitan background tend to find employment in this sector. This implies that the sector demands a set of attributes that are not distributed across all segments in society.

Next, even within such a narrow segment from which the sector draws its workforce from, there appear to be further barriers to entry like age. Even though the younger age profile can partly be explained by the nascent stage of the sector, barriers to entry into the workforce for older segments of the population seem to exist. The age-related barrier, it appears, is also tied to the marital status of employees especially, women. That such entry barriers exist poses important questions about the exact nature of skill requirement and the factors behind such a skewed employment pattern.

b) Mode of Recruitment and Skill Profile of the Workforce

Studies of work in a servitised economy in general and in call centres in particular indicate the need for what are referred to as 'soft' skills and use of 'emotional labour' (Belt, Richardson and Webster 2000a). Soft skills essentially refer to inter-personal skills like ability to communicate, and convince clients. Emotional labour involves the capacity to 'publicly display an emotion that they may not necessarily feel' (Wharton 1993:28, cited in Belt, Richardson and Webster 2000:14). An ability to 'smile down the telephone' as it is often referred to is seen to be suited for women. Given the increasing role for such inter-personal services, either face to face or long distance through ICTs, women are expected to find better employment and growth prospects in the new economy. In the study on call centres in Europe, Belt, Richardson and Webster (2000a, 42) present a hierarchy of skill requirements in a declining order.
a) Communication Skills
b) Customer Service
c) Product Knowledge
d) IT skills
The authors also go on to add that there are differences in skill requirements, depending upon the industry segment that the call centres provide services for. Thus, for instance, customer support services for hardware producers warrant a higher level of technical knowledge than one that caters to banking customers. However, communication skills rank high in all call centre segments. In India, this need for communication skills translate into differing requirements depending upon the clientele that the firm caters to. Since catering to foreign clients, especially in the USA and UK is a major growth segment, understanding of English language in addition to an ability to follow the respective accents and respond in the same becomes very important. In call centres catering to a domestic clientele, knowledge of English and the local language is both essential. However, as stressed by the respondents in a domestic call centre, the standards expected in English is not as high as compared to that in an international call centre. What they probably imply by lower standards may be a lack of emphasis on accent. In the call centre that provides support for hardware, recruitment was done solely from a pool of engineering graduates. Here again, in addition to knowledge of hardware use, ability to communicate in English to a global clientele is critical.

Recruitment is based largely on walk-ins that may or may not be backed by advertisements. Recruitment through ads are confined to the initial phases in most cases following which recruitment is done through random walk-ins that may or may not be backed by referrals. Selection to the lower levels, i.e., agents or customer care representatives, is done through a written test followed by an interview. While the tests seek to examine the knowledge of English language along with their IQ and an ability to react to situations quickly, interviews seek to primarily evaluate the communicative capabilities of the candidate. Though such skills need not be confined to only the highly educated, firms do have restrictions on the minimum formal educational qualifications. While most firms insist on a minimum of a Bachelor's degree, a few firms insist only on completion of school, ie, 12th standard. The reason for erecting such a barrier, according to HR managers is that they are better trained in English by the time they complete school. And second, having been through college also helps potential employees to have access to a wider knowledge base that they can draw upon in the course of their interaction with clients. In addition to these factors, another and probably a more important one would be the availability of large number of school leavers and graduates with few other employment opportunities.

It needs to be remembered that the lower employment elasticity of output since the 1980s has also been accompanied by the growth of very few employment augmenting sectors in the post-liberalisation era. While garments and gems and jewellery are two sectors that rapidly grew and absorbed labour as well, employment in these sectors are confined to the less literate or the illiterate, employed under 'informal' conditions in most cases (Kapadia 1999; Vijayabaskar 1999). For the relatively more formally educated and technically skilled, software services turned out to be the most sought after sector not only for its relatively higher salary levels but also due to the declining employment generation elsewhere. We have, earlier in this study, noted the decline in recruitment in the auto industry despite a fairly high degree of dynamism and growth. Since this seems to reflect a macro-phenomenon (Nagaraj 1994), it is only logical that to this segment of the workforce, IT enabled services constitute a significant share of employment generation. Manager respondents opine that though they are open to recruitment of those who have only completed school, the selection procedures in place allow only a few from this category as there are many with a graduate degree who outcompete the former segment. To this extent, considering the fact that the call centre industry does not require or use such skills acquired in college, there does appear to be an underutilisation of skills. To be sure, such lack of utilisation is not confined to the ITES segment. Even earlier and in other sectors, formal educational qualifications were and are used as entry barriers and also as selection mechanisms to overcome the problem of a vast number of unemployed seeking to enter a labour market that offers fewer jobs.

Among the 50 employees interviewed in random, 46 are graduates, one a diploma holder and the remaining two having completed only school. Among the 46 respondents, 15 have additional qualifications like a diploma and six others even have post-graduate qualifications. Among the 10 interviewed purposively, except one, all had at least a graduate degree. Interestingly, the non-graduate employee works as supervisor and has had 3-4 years of work experience after completing school and before joining the call centre studied. There were not many differences between call centres and other ITES firms like medical transcription and back office processing. Only in the MT case firm studied, there was a qualified medical professional and a couple of employees with a pharmacy degree, training that is definitely of use to the industry.

We also found that among the 46 employees studied, 7 have engineering degrees, all but one employed in the hardware support centre. While the hardware support call centre employs only engineering graduates specialising in computer science or in electronics, a few with engineering degrees are employed even in other call centres. The main reason that they suggest is the slowdown in the software industry that has denied them jobs. To them however, this employment is only a temporary arrangement before either the software industry takes off again or before they acquire admission into institutes of higher learning either in India or mostly in the USA. Also, none of the respondents we interviewed are trained in any of the training centres that have mushroomed of late in most cities where the industry has grown. According to HR heads interviewed, the quality of training leaves a lot to be desired. However, informal sources reveal that such trainees do get absorbed in smaller centres that do not have adequate training facilities.

c) Systems of Remuneration

In the call centres studied, irrespective of whether they are export oriented or domestic, the remuneration is more or less the same. Starting salaries hover in the range of Rs. 5000 to Rs. 7000 per month. Though the salary level appears to be low, it still is sufficient enough to be attractive to potential aspirants to employment. This, it appears is due to their relatively lower educational attainment and more importantly, the lower salary levels prevalent in jobs open to them in other segments. Lack of adequate employment opportunities in other segments of the economy is another factor that makes employment in call centres attractive. In addition to the initial salaries, performance based incentives are provided to employees as their work performance improves over time. Elaborate measurement standards are in place that enables workers to gauge their performance and strive for additional income through monetary incentives. By the end of the first year, most employees earn around Rs. 10-11,000, the additional income accruing by way of performance incentives. In addition to incentives for individual performance, incentive systems also allow for group performance enhancement. Agents are placed in teams of 8 to 12, each team headed by a team leader. While at times, teams are differentiated by the clients they cater to, or the kind of work they handle, quite often they perform similar work. The total team's performance is evaluated periodically and both monetary and non-monetary awards are given for teams that perform above average. Such a system also allows for work assistance from senior well-trained employees for the younger inexperienced workers. We may even contend that such a system enables reduction in costs of training incurred by the firm. Personnel in higher levels in the call centre firm earn higher amounts ranging from Rs. 15, 000 for team leaders to Rs. 20, 000 for supervisors and more for managers. The salary levels are relatively lower in both the MT firm and the back office-processing firm studied.

d) Training, Skill Acquisition and Firm Performance
In an earlier section, we mentioned the importance of soft skills and 'emotional labour' to the industry. The most important characteristic as far as skill requirements are concerned is the distinction made by respondents between what are formally acquired skills from what are seen as personality traits like 'ability to listen', 'patience', and the wherewithal required to be pleasant when confronted by angry or abusive clients. Such attributes are typically seen as 'feminine' traits, rendering call centre work highly gendered. Thus, traits seen to be acquired due to gendered household division of labour are now being deployed in the sphere of the market. While to some, this implies a better deal for women as it draws them into paid employment and hence into the public sphere, this movement essentially implies reinforcement of gendered work roles.

Apart from such attributes to perform 'emotional labour', the skill sets of the workforce recruited however needs to be supplemented by further training within the firm. We already mentioned the inadequate quality of training provided by external training centres with regard to call centre specific skills. In-house training in the bigger, established call centres normally fall under two categories; communication/general and product based training. The former involves communication skills and etiquette as well as training to understand and speak English with the accent spoken by the clientele, American in most cases and British in a few. When the firms were initially established, a team from the client country had come and imparted training to the employees. Subsequently, the trained employees are deployed to train the latter recruits. The training period for this purpose normally involves a month. This is followed in most cases by a week of training about the product. In the case of hardware, however, product training is provided for nearly a month. This training, as one respondent from the firm said, "After the training, you really know how a computer works and when something goes wrong, what exactly has gone wrong. Though we do learn a lot about computer architecture and such stuff in college, this hands on experience gives a totally different feel to the computer." Going by such statements, and the amount spent on training, there does appear to be a diffusion of skills as a result of the growth of the ITES segment.

In the MT sector, apart from an ability to follow the foreign accent, it is also important to pick up the medical terminology used. Employees need to have typing skills as well. Since few employees with a medical or pharmacology degree enter into the sector, quality of service delivery in this segment leaves a lot to be desired. In the BOP segment, skill requirements have little to do with communication. Employees are expected to scan through applications from clients for getting credit cards or say, for insurance claims. This essentially requires knowledge of the criteria that need to be fulfilled to be eligible and then specifying whether the particular application needs consideration or otherwise. Here, the training is only for a period of two weeks.

Apart from the initial training, all respondents report having participated in many training programmes that involve both provision of new product information and updating of communication and organisational skills. The training also includes a 'on the job' component. In the initial days after being put on the job, there is a continuous monitoring of the person's communication abilities by a set of people termed as voice coaches. Voice coaches further train the new recruits with regard to accent. Apart from such training, recruits also over a period of time strive to reduce the time taken to complete a call, be it inbound or outbound. Monetary incentives are provided towards this. Similar on the job training practices are found in MT firms as well. The efficacy of on the job training is highly correlated with the performance based remuneration systems discussed in the previous section. A combination of a low fixed salary level and a performance based incentive system seems to be an effective mechanism to enhance employee productivity.

This finds partial confirmation from the HR heads interviewed. According to them, the quality of performance is quite often better than that in call cnetres in the client country or in other low-income countries like the Philippines where firms outsource a portion of customer interaction work. To be sure, such performance standards have been achieved only over time, and there are call centres in India where quality of output continues to be inconsistent. In one of the firms studied, one client had in fact withdrawn its contract, almost forcing the firm to close down before managing to get another one. In a couple of others, clients have threatened to withdraw if performance did not improve. In most cases, client firms are yet to outsource large portions of their call centre work to firms in India. They start out with a small contract and enhance it over time basing their decision on the performance.

In all the firms studied, performance in the first year or two was below the standards expected, the most important cause being differences in the socio-cultural domain. Despite being well trained in accent, several problems come up due to lack of awareness of the way in which language is embedded in specific social practices. Same words carry different meanings, and as a result, there were several problems in communication. As a HR manager said, "When an American says "I will consider later", he really means it and you are not supposed to persuade him further on this. But we in India are not used to such abrupt endings, and we continue to persuade hoping that he will change his mind. Customers will then blow their tops. Then when they say, "Call later", you are expected to end the call right away and not hang on hoping to get a further lead. But now our agents have learnt the knack of dealing with such situations."

This phenomenon sheds light on the discussion on the extent to which inter-personal services are embedded in a local milieu. Some argue that there is a large amount of knowledge that is tacit and hence cannot be transferred outside the milieu. The above experience, while partly supporting the proposition also indicates its limitations. What is tacit at one point in time does not always remain so. Accent for instance, now has been transferred to people in another region and even the embedding of language and modes of conversing are now coded and passed on. Call centre agents are even trained to keep track of information on the caller's city's weather, latest political, cultural and sporting events as an aid to their interaction over the telephone. Technological developments ensure that as soon as a caller reaches an agent, the agent gets such useful information on the video screen. The information can then be used to convey familiarity and hence a sense of intimacy with the caller that may be beneficial to efficient transactions over the telephone.

While work in ITES is characterised as a 'modern' job, the likes of which are expected to grow in future, in high income countries, call centres, especially of the low-end kind have been termed as sweatshops of the 'new' economy that offers demeaning, monotonous and highly stressful work. Interestingly, low-income and marginalised groups like immigrant communities dominate the call centre workforce there, unlike in India, where most employees hail from the elite segments. Also, a majority of respondents including male employees claimed to enjoy their work in call centres despite its gendered nature. The phenomenon prompts us to examine the nature of work in Indian ITES firms and the factors that draw labour into this segment apart from the incomes it offers.

e) Quality of Work in Call Centres

Work consists primarily of two types, inbound and outbound. Employees in inbound work provide after-sales service over the telephone, a substantial portion of which does not require face to face interaction or physical presence on the customer's site. Outbound work involves tele-marketing, ie, making efforts to sell a product or service to potential customers. Work in call centres are normally organised into three 8-hour shifts. The shifts are from 10 PM to 6 AM, 6 AM to 2 PM and 2 PM to 10 PM. Since most client firms are located either in the USA or UK, the night shift is the more important one as most calls are made during daytime in client countries. There are generally no male-female differences in working the various shifts.

In big, established call centres , firms provide their own means of transport to the employees. This mode is resorted to primarily because of the prevalence of night shifts and the apprehensions that parents in India have about sending their daughters to work at night. Often, parents come to talk to the HR head to be reassured of their daughter's safety at work. They are taken around the workplace and told about the security arrangements both within the firm and during their commute to work. Despite the many who still refuse to permit their daughters to work, firms do manage to access the required numbers. The larger number of male workers in the Indian call centre industry may also be due to this factor. In the domestic call centre that we studied, however, there were no transport facilities provided.

Employees, as soon as they enter the firm log in their entry time and are briefed by the team leader about work done in the previous shift and the nature of continuity that needs to be established with regard to their work. As soon as a caller dials, she is taken through a series of automated steps that not only identifies the caller but also answers a few basic queries. Only when the caller needs further information is the call transferred to an agent. The agent then listens to the caller's query and responds accordingly. In the case of inbound work, calls are routed through a system that identifies agents who are free and directs the calls to them. As soon as the call reaches the agent, with the help of computer-telephony integration (CTI) systems, information about the caller pops up on the screen as soon as the caller identifies herself.

Over time, the responses are increasingly routinised. Agents are provided with 'scripts' that gives the agent appropriate responses to be made to a set of questions. Scripts are developed by taking into account the range of queries that can be potentially asked and the nature of responses that need to be provided. Agents are expected to stick to the script. Only in say, three to four percent of the total calls received do queries go beyond the script, which warrants exercise of the agent's intelligence to respond. Many a time, such occasions call for intervention of the team leader or supervisor. In sum, work for agents in call centres involves very little use of one's discretion or ingenuity. Rather, it rather requires them to put on a demeanour that may often conflict with what they actually feel at the moment. As a respondent who has completed a year's work in the domestic call centre responded poignantly, "Work here has taught me to be patient. I mean I have become more patient even outside the call centre. In the initial days, I used to be quite aggressive with clients because I am normally that kind of a person. I used to get angry soon and argue with my friends and at home. But within two weeks after joining here, I was warned by the supervisor that I can't be rude to customers! Since then, I have changed a lot. I try to empathise with the customers and realise that had I been in the customer's position, I too would be angry like him." She went on to add, "Now I do it all the time. When I go shopping or when I don't like what my parents or friends do, I do not get angry at all. Even my friends tell me that." Again, even within call centres, as pointed out earlier, high-end work like technical support service providers for say hardware or software definitely requires utilisation of skills acquired, though it must be stated, routine solutions to most problems are available here as well. Work experience, definitely brings with it a high degree of learning, an attribute that cannot be said of work in other kinds of call centre firms.

Employees are however, not expected to exercise any kind of 'emotional labour' in back office processing or in medical transcription firms. Nevertheless, work here too does not require use of one's judgement or intelligence. Scripts are once again provided to back office-processing workers. For instance, work that involves examining whether a particular applicant is eligible for a credit card or whether a claimant is eligible for insurance claims, and if eligible the amount eligible for, are all standardised. Employees are expected to follow a series of standard checks to ensure that the claim is valid.

Medical transcription requires not only an ability to follow foreign accents, but also requires awareness of medical terms that are used among doctors. Hence, even qualified doctors and pharmacology trained graduates are employed. Since salary levels are quite low, not too many such qualified personnel find their way into this sector, posing a number of quality issues that threaten to undermine its growth potential.

In call centres, customers often tend to be upset over the quality of product or service delivered, and agents find themselves at the receiving end of their ire. Or else, as some respondents point out, when customers realise that the call is being attended to from India, they are reluctant to divulge their personal information required for identification. At times, their reactions are even tinged with racism, refusing to talk to an Indian and insist on being put on to an American agent. Even under extreme provocation, employees can ill-afford to react angrily or even cut the caller abruptly. They can only explain politely that the customer is not being helpful by being angry or rude. Such bottling up of emotions can prove to be a frustrating experience, especially in the initial months after which employees learn to cope with it. Many respondents (all of them female) cited instances when they have burst into tears and sought permission from their team leader for a short break to regain their composure to get back to work.

The most frustrating aspect of such moments is their total lack of responsibility for the mistakes made and their inability to redress their grievances as at best they can only inform others that things have to be rectified. A crucial component of their work, it appears, includes acting as an intermediary to absorb negative reactions from customers. Stress at work is further compounded by the lack of any time gap between two calls. Thus, during busy hours, agents just move from one call to the other without any let-up. If they do get a break after say, a stressful call, it helps them to recoup, but here, they are forced to move on to the next call and talk pleasantly without emotionally coming to terms with the earlier call. Respondents however, do agree that team leaders are quite responsive on such occasions and spend time talking to them and explaining to them how to react 'appropriately' under such circumstances.

In the case of outbound call centre work, employees make 'cold calls', ie, random calls to potential customers and then strive to sell them a product or a service. To that extent, they do have control over the time taken over and between calls. At the same time, here, since the agents make the calls and not the customer, often, the customers react angrily for being disturbed in between important work. So the chances of encountering irate customers are much more than in inbound calls. It is for this reason, more respondents preferred to work in inbound calls than in outbound calls as when customers call they feel that they are easier to 'handle'. In outbound work, employees are also expected to meet targets, like the number of successful calls made in proportion to the total calls made, amount of time spent per call, etc. While there are targets, the period for achieving targets is by and large on a monthly basis unlike in the case of MT firms where employees are expected to complete specific targets on a daily basis.

Medical transcription firms are given only 24 hours time period for the entire audio data on tapes to be transcripted and sent. Apart from delays due to quality and problems associated with specific accents, there are frequent transmission problems that render sticking to the deadline a tough task. At times, the data received contains too much of noise or may be delayed due to loss of transmission links. On these occasions, employees are expected to stay on to complete the work within the shorter time period available and send it across. Given the early stages of growth of the ITES sector, it may be worthwhile to examine the nature of technological changes and their impact over time to have a better understanding of the direction towards which work quality has moved over time. The information detailed here is however partial and is used only to highlight its impact on work.

f) Technological Change and Implications for Quality of Work
In call centres, the major trend has been towards routinisation of work on the one hand and increasing efficiency through automation on the other. The growing automation of responses has definitely reduced the quantity of labour required in a call centre. In India, however, call centres have come up only after this innovation. While such automation definitely implies liberation of workers from routine work, other innovations have only reinforced the routinisation trajectory. Development of elaborate scripts prevents exercise of one's intelligence or creativity. This trend is likely to increase in future as more and more dimensions of service delivery are routinised. Of late, attempts are also afoot to introduce accent neutralising software that enables employers to employ people without having to train them on a specific accent. If successful, it will further reduce the skill level of the workforce though it may then be accessible to other segments of the workforce as well.

In medical transcription firms, there has been a movement from hand-operated mechanism for playing back or pausing the audio player to one that enables employees to use their feet for this purpose. The latter technique almost doubles the speed of a transcriptionist's work. Forcing an employee to vest more bodily effort in a given period of time, it allows firms to employ lesser number of employees to transcribe the work obtained. In the case of back office processing too, scripts are available that takes an employee through successive steps to the final evaluation. We need to note that all these innovations have to be complemented by innovations in communications infrastructure that enables firms to outsource such work. In sum, it does appear that work in ITES firms is subject to deskilling, an observation that undermines claims to a new enriching work culture in the informational economy. Or else, automation may further reduce its labour absorption potential. In this context, given the capitalist imperative to derive maximum returns to labour employed, it is also important to examine the ways in which the pace and quality of work is monitored and secured in these firms.

g) Modes of Work Control
While the assembly line epitomises the dominant mode of worker control in the Fordist model of capitalist work organisation, the electronic eye can easily be the new metaphor for worker control in the informational economy. ICTs provide management with powerful systems of monitoring and control of both pace and quality of work. It may be true that under different social conditions, similar technologies can empower workers at lower levels in the hierarchy or for that matter, even reduce the need for such hierarchised production structures. In the Indian ITES sector however, ICTs have been used largely to reduce the autonomy of workers and enhance the ability of management to monitor the workforce.

We could not obtain enough information on these aspects in the MT and BPO firms studied. In the call centre industry, various parameters of work performance are continuously measured and available on a real time basis to management. The time taken per call, the rate of success, time spent between calls, etc is not only available but also used by management to monitor performance and introduce incentive systems as well. Such systems also enable management to reduce the need for supervision and middle management, a factor that may be responsible for low number of levels in the organisation. Such flat structures however do not imply that mobility is easier or authority is more decentralised. On the contrary, it is a reflection of the ability to exercise greater control over the workforce without recourse to an elaborate administrative and managerial structure. Managers can and do resort to random monitoring of calls. That is, they can overhear calls being attended to or made by agents to evaluate various dimensions of the call. The fact that such a possibility exists also forces workers to put in their best effort all the time. As one respondent said, "The floor manager can listen to our calls any time he wants. So we need to be careful all the time about how we talk. Once one of my colleagues who had joined recently got angry with one client and was shouting back. The manager immediately after the call called her and warned her to behave properly."

Also, such systems allow management to develop comprehensive performance evaluation systems that gives a long-term view of an individual's performance. Apart from such technology supported systems, there are also other managerial practices to enhance performance like putting up periodically in common bulletin boards, the best and worst performing teams that exerts considerable pressure on the various teams to improve their performance. Such practices seriously question the claims to greater worker autonomy and decentralisation of power in an informatised economy. Next, we examine the prospects for a career in the ITES segment through mobility, intra-firm or inter-firm.

h) Scope for Mobility
Mobility, intra-firm or inter-firm, is crucial to ensure that jobs in ITES firms can be a part of or lead to a life-long career and not remain as just jobs. Traditional organisational structures offer the prospects of intra-firm vertical mobility with its multiple levels of hierarchy. New organisational forms are purported to be smaller, and hence offer less prospects for intra-firm mobility but increases scope for inter-firm mobility. Even within firms, it is claimed that since levels are lesser and decision-making powers are more decentralised, mobility becomes easier. Evidence from the Indian ITES sector strongly contests such positive claims to mobility and career development.

Given the small number of levels in the organisation, prospects for intra-firm mobility are highly limited. The lower number of levels however does not imply flatter structures. In fact, in the call centres studied, there are a large number of agents and very few numbers employed in the managerial levels. The first move up the organisational ladder is to become a team leader. As there is only one team leader for 10 agents, only one of the 10 agents stands a chance of getting promoted. Promotions, however, do not take a long time, and we find team leaders with even one year of work experience as an agent. Normally, it takes approximately 1.5 to 2 years for agents to become team leaders. Team leaders then go on to become supervisors after say another 2 years or so. Also, quite often, we observe that supervisors and managers are recruited from other sectors. When supervisors are recruited from other sectors, they are trained to help them understand the work processes in call centres. That recruitment to higher-level positions from other sectors is only due to the sector's origins in the recent past and consequent lack of experienced human power within this sector however needs mention. Nevertheless, given the few positions available at such levels, the industry offers little scope for vertical mobility within the firm. This scenario is true of both MT and BOP firms as well.

Importantly, the sector has little to offer even by way of inter-firm mobility. With the growing number of call centres, and a relative scarcity of experienced agents, there is a demand for such agents from new call centres, who lure them with higher salaries. Employees do have the option of moving from one firm to the other, but only within the call centre industry, but more importantly, are confined to only being agents. In other words, inter-firm mobility is not accompanied by vertical mobility in most cases. Very few (only five) say that work here helps them to build a career outside the call centre industry. They felt that the training they receive in communication skills does help them to find jobs in public relations field in other sectors. Eleven others saw their jobs as leading to a career within the ITES sector. Eleven of the rest do feel that there is a career to be made within the industry. Interestingly, seven of them had already been promoted as either team leaders or supervisors or voice coaches.

In the MT firm, interestingly, all the respondents do see a career to be made in this profession though mobility prospects are equally limiting. To most respondents in call centres, work there essentially meant a job that does not hold much for their future. Sixty per cent of the remaining respondents said that they are working only to save some money to join some educational course later. The rest, mostly women, claim that it is a stop gap arrangement and are at it since it is better than spending time at home apart form yielding some income to meet their consumption needs. Except two, none of the female respondents felt that they could continue in this sector after their wedding. Night shifts were cited as the major hindering factor. This inability is also evident from the fact that there are very few married women working in the firms studied. We purposively chose two of the married employees to examine the problems faced by them. One of them even has a child, but she said that she has a strong family support system that enables her to leave her child with them and come to work in the night shifts. Also, she said that the income she gets from this work is important, as her husband who was working in a software firm had lost his job a few months ago. In the second case, both the husband and wife work in the same call centre, and hence easier for them to manage domestic work. However, she expressed uncertainty about her continuing on this once she has a child.

Interestingly, even HR heads are of the opinion that employees cannot work in call centres as agents for too long as they are likely to experience burnout within 3-4 years of working as an agent. While some may continue due to movement into higher positions, working as an agent for too long is extremely difficult. This is even true of employees working in the hardware technical support centre where even though mobility prospects are better due to existence of more levels in the organisation, the number of such openings, continue to remain small. It therefore appears that employment in the ITES sector in India do not constitute a life long career unlike work in traditional sectors. Careers may be a possibility even in the absence of vertical mobility if there is scope for horizontal mobility and salary hikes linked to experience.

In the bigger call centres, employees are provided with an option of moving from one client to the other or from inbound work to outbound work. Definitely such movement offers relatively better quality of work than being stuck to one type of client or one kind of work in a smaller call centre. Respondents do look forward to such changes. There are once again limits though to the creative content of such horizontal mobility. Earlier, when call centre or service operations were integral activities of the vertically integrated larger firm, employees in the service division did have the possibility of moving to other departments and hence enjoyed better prospects for non-monotonous work. Even our study of the auto industry reveals the existence of such possibilities. The enhanced inter-firm division of labour enabled by developments in ICTs restricts such opportunities for employees in call centres and other such ITES firms. Of course, it must be stated here that medical transcription, even earlier did not entail much scope for such mobility.

i) Employment Contracts
Unlike call centres in the West where many types of contracts co-exist even within a firm, here, in all the firms studied, employees are employed on a permanent basis. They are put through a year's probation after which they become permanent employees. This makes them eligible for gratuity and provident fund benefits. However, since the export oriented call centres are located in export parks, they need not comply with exit procedures that are supposed to render labour markets in India rigid. Further, Indian labour laws bar women from being employed in night shifts. To circumvent this rule, employers, at least in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have sought permission from State Governments to allow women employees to work in night shifts. The Karnataka government has in fact passed legislation that legalises women's work in night shifts. They are entitled to two days of leave every week and then medical leave as and when HR heads are convinced of the need. In one of the firms studied, every year, the lowest 10 per cent of performers are liable to be automatically retrenched.

Given the strenuous work conditions, deskilled work and limited prospects for a long term career, it is indeed surprising that the industry continues to draw a large number of workers. As stated earlier, in high-income countries, such work is largely taken up by members occupying lower levels of the social hierarchy with few other employment prospects. Here, however, we do observe that the workforce is drawn from urban elite or middle-income families, living in financially better conditions. To them, such work may not offer sufficient incentive to join the labour force. Our fieldwork, surprisingly, proves to the contrary. Very few employees thought that work was strenuous or stressful and hence degrading. In fact, 70 per cent of respondents opined that they liked their work and some even went to the extent of saying that it is challenging and creative. As for the rest, to some it was stressful work that make them "want to throw the headset and run", "cut off my ears", etc. To others, it is work and you cannot complain about it. As one of them puts it, "You cannot crib about work, that is life. You need to cope with it." Such fatalistic perceptions stand in contrast to the enthusiasm evinced by the majority that includes male employees as well. It is therefore important to understand the way in which perceptions of such work is being constructed in India and the possible factors influencing the process.

j) Meanings of Work and Creation of Consent
In the course of our interviews, we could identify two sources of interest in call centre work. One stems from the nature of work content itself and another from its use in achieving other ends. To some of the respondents, work in call centres are not strenuous or for that matter, even monotonous. Each call is a new experience of interacting with a new customer and hence not repetitive at all. Further, in the case of outbound work, making a successful call is seen as a challenge by agents, especially male respondents. To quote a respondent, "I love talking in general, so working in a call centre is fun for me. It is also challenging to sell a product to a customer. Each customer is different. We need to find out the best way to talk to them to convince them. That motivates you all the time." Seeing work as a challenge is interestingly confined to male respondents, while to women employees who claim to enjoy work, it is fun talking to strangers, helping them sort out problems.
HR managers too do not hint at any preference for women employees or those with 'sweet' voices as cited by Buchanan and Koch-Schulte in the context of Canadian call centres. Employee respondents concede this sex-neutral approach to recruitment. Men are not only well represented, but male respondents do not perceive this work as women's work. Though this dimension needs further examination that is beyond the scope of this study, pointers towards possible explanation can be put forth. One, male employees, confronted with few employment opportunities in other sectors, are forced into work in the ITES sector. Once employed, they may not desire to identify their job as a typical 'woman's job'. They may subconsciously seek to re-encode their work so as to render it into work that men too can be comfortable with. Viewing outbound calls as a challenge may be one indicator of such recoding processes at work. As indicated, only male employees hinted at this dimension of their work. Such perceptions, coming as they do from male agents, imply that gender codes need not be rigid and can be fluid enough to accommodate changes to ensure reproduction of the required labour force. It also shows that work can be 'recoded' to facilitate entry of men into a domain that is historically constructed as women's work.

The extent to which training programmes aid such recasting of perceptions is not clear. They may well play an important role. Also since the call centre is part of a new segment providing 'fashionable' work environments, unhindered by the burden of tradition, male employees may find it a lot easier to invoke such notions about work. As a society moves towards a 'post-industrial' phase where work that is 'physical' and 'strenuous', and hence 'masculine' is declining, employment opportunities are available only in the service sectors that demand both intellectual and emotional labour. By attributing intellectual content to jobs that are traditionally seen as involving only emotional labour, men may seek to recode work so as to facilitate their participation in the 'new economy'. What we witness in call centres may be an indication of such new gendering processes under new capitalist work conditions. Also such recoding questions some feminist positions that envisage a liberatory potential in new technologies as they privilege skills that are seen to be vested more with women. Patriarchal authority may redefine itself in new ways through such recoding practices rather than dissolve itself in the rapids of the ICT revolution.

Consent for such stressful and monotonous work is also secured by the ways in which such work facilitates accumulation of cultural capital outside the workplace. In India, knowledge of spoken English is confined to a small, elite segment of the populace, though aspired by large segments. The knowledge brings with it therefore, a sense of elite belonging and hence, high social status. Further, the growing globalisation of some segments of the economy places a large premium on such language communication skills. Trained to communicate fluently in British or American English, call centre employees find themselves in an enviable position, equipped with a skill that enhances their social position outside the workplace and aids them socialise in elite circles.

Firms, through the organisation of employees' leisure reinforce such identity formation. Regular parties are organised apart from picnics for employees. Picnics include games for employees aimed at enhancing interactions and building a sense of camaraderie. In one call centre, housed in an international technology park along with other software firms, dance parties are held on the last Friday of every month. Employees dance to live music that currently dominates the western pop music market. Liberal dress codes also impart a sense of freedom to employees, evident in the oft-cited remarks by respondents, "It is like a college campus." Or, "I love working here, it is fun." One respondent who had moved out of a call centre and works as a secretary to a research team elsewhere said that she misses all the fun. "Here, I don't have anyone to talk to. People are not in my age group or my wavelength. But there, we used to be eight of us hanging out together. Every weekend we used to go out for movies, shopping… Only because my mother didn't want me to work in night shifts, I had to quit."

The re-creation of work in call centres as one filled with fun appears to play an important role in drawing or retaining labour. Relying on a young workforce from fairly well off families too aids this process. They see this job as only a temporary one that can help them earn a bit of money to meet their immediate consumption needs as they continue to be dependent upon their parents and family for other reproductive needs. Incomes earned in call centres are used to buy 2 wheelers at times, for expensive clothing and related fashion accessories. In rare cases, the money was saved up to pursue further education after a short stint in calls centres. Disposable incomes are also higher as their transport requirements are taken care of by firms. It however needs reiteration that the latter and even the formation of new consumption identities are true only for bigger, export oriented call centres and not in other kinds of ITES firms.

VIII Synthesis of Findings

In this section, we relate the findings from the Indian auto industry and ITES sector to the research questions raised. Technology encompasses technical as well as social relations. Hence, to see the changes it effects as solely due to its technical characteristics or to view it as purely an outcome of social choice are both limiting. It is worthwhile to perceive the inter-relationship between technological change and organisational dynamic as one with tendencies that are crucially conditioned by social relations in the workplace. Rather than talk about impacts, it is useful to examine the way it is shaped as it is deployed in a firm, shaped by nature of resistance faced, modes of securing consent from various agents in the firms, and external conditions like product market dynamic and macro-policy regime. Such an exercise enables us to identify key institutions that push labour market changes in desirable directions.

1. Deskilling and Skill Polarisation

Evidence from the Indian automobile industry and the ITES sector do suggest a trend towards skill polarisation. In traditional manufacturing, as ICTs diffuse, certain skill sets that can be termed as craft-based like machining, welding, etc become redundant whereas need for cognitive skills increase. In other words, skills are dematerialized, as employees are required to work with and manipulate symbols that represent the actual production parameters. Mobility within the auto sector is tied to an ability to acquire such new skills. Also, by removing the need for manual supervision, less skilled employees in the shopfloor are left with fewer options for vertical mobility. Even within the realm of the cognitive, ICTs render routine tasks less relevant over time, whereas enhancing the need for non-routine decision-making skills.

At the macro-level, this trend, however, does not necessarily imply that skills are polarized. Polarisation does not happen when labour whose skill sets are made redundant, can be trained, equipped with new skill sets and redeployed to undertake new tasks. Polarisation stems from the fact the skill endowments of labour whose tasks are made less important are not adequate to cope with new requirements. Thus, mobility prospects are not open to segments of the workforce whose skill sets are made redundant by deployment of ICTs. Labour in less skilled occupations in India have less formal educational training, a crucial requirement for acquiring new cognitive skills. In India, where tertiary education is accessed by less than 10 per cent of the population, polarization is indeed a possibility. By enhancing the vertical mobility of the elite with access to tertiary education, ICTs may contribute to growing socio-economic inequities if appropriate institutional intervention is not made. Strategies need to be devised so as to equip labour with new skills even in the absence of any tertiary educational qualifications. New kinds of labour certifications need to be created to achieve this objective. Further, intra-firm mobility hinges crucially on the product market conditions. If firms operate under buoyant conditions, better the prospects are for mobility.

Also, introduction of CNCs has enabled the separation of conception from execution, a move that provides scope for deskilling. Interestingly, we observe that there are inter-firm differences in how this possibility has opened up spaces for labour. Deskilling does happen in one firm whereas in the other, workers are trained to programme the machines thereby enskilling them. Nevertheless, labour that fails to or is unable to equip itself with new skills is bound to be excluded or marginalised in the new technological regime. While we do not find enough evidence for deskilling in the auto industry and even scope for enskilling as only routine tasks are made redundant, there is a strong deskilling trend in the call centre industry.

A nascent sector, drawing labour from new sources and hence, not yet collectively organised, capital has been able to introduce technological innovations with a clear deskilling trajectory. Even here, there has been automation of routine tasks to a certain extent though the routinisation of work does overarch such tendencies. Given the fact that the industry is only a few years old in India, it is difficult to discern any tendencies towards skill polarisation. Nevertheless the creation of such sectors with low paying, low skilled and dead-end jobs by itself may reflect such polarisation processes at work at a macro-level.

2. Disintermediation, Firm Size and Form

Here again, we observe the manner in which intra-firm relations condition the changes in organisational structure wrought by ICTs. With the introduction of ERP systems, top management do have the option of exercising control over the production process without much reliance on middle management. Disintermediation in established organisations, however requires that middle management relinquishes its power since it is not possible to completely remove such layers. The power wielded by middle management is therefore critical to such delayering. The introduction of ERP systems, interestingly, requires strong support from middle management as top management is highly dependent upon them to secure consent from the workforce. In many a firm, middle managers have held elaborate discussions with workers and their representatives to dispel any fears that they may have concerning job loss or loss of autonomy. The relations of trust they have established with the workforce are also a source of their power. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to use the new technological systems to undermine their role in the organisation. It may be a possibility in the future but the highly tacit nature of business processes and procedures in India render even that difficult.

Call centre firms, on the other hand, are characterised by low levels of middle management. Unburdened by any previous organisational baggage, capital has been able to fashion organisations that use advances in ICTs to almost elimintae the need for any middle management. Interestingly, such organisations are not flatter than conventional bureaucratic firms, but more hierarchical with power less diffused in the organisation. Thus, as we shall see in the next section, the scope for disintermediation and worker autonomy stands thwarted by virtue of capital's ability to wield greater power in the workplace.

3. Worker Autonomy

The scope that ICTs offer to promote decentralised decision making and empowered workforce is completely run down in both the sectors. In the automobile industry, since the implementation of ERP systems is essentially a top-down activity, workers are hardly aware of the potential it offers them to wrest some autonomy from management. ERP systems, on the other hand, provide management the technical feasibility of exercising greater control over the workprocess and hence control the pace and quality of work. But, due to fears that such initiatives may face resistance from the workforce, management has desisted from making very obvious moves in that direction. As other studies indicate, even product market conditions play a crucial role in this regard. If management perceives that efficiency is to be gained by giving greater decision making authority to lower levels in the organisation, it is possible for such decentralisation to occur. But even under such conditions, management may not act in the interests of capital as it still implies loss of their power in the organisation.

In the ITES segment, ICTs are used to reduce worker autonomy and centralise power in the organisation. Efficient monitoring and controlling ICT based systems are built that leave little scope for worker autonomy. Further, as stated earlier, the jobs do not call for exercise of high level skills which also implies that even provision of autonomy to the workforce does not lead to improved efficiency. Once again, lack of any resistance on the part of workers to such intense surveillance is a major factor in strengthening the trend.

4. Flexibility in Labour Markets
ICTs, by reducing coordination costs, are argued to lead to greater reliance on external labour markets than on internal labour markets. Evidence from our study points to the limitations of such a transaction cost based approach in understanding ICT impacts. In the Indian auto industry, given the employment protection offered by the state and a high degree of unionisation, firms continue to rely on internal labour, though it must be said that the levels of outsourcing has always been high. Another important factor that militates against reliance on external labour markets is the high degree of firm specific skills that are vested with the firm's workforce and the importance of such skills to the firm's efficiency. Since by and large firms retain only the crucial operations in-house like machining of critical components and assembly, such skills may not be easily available externally. With accent on quality becoming prominence in a more competitive environment, firms tend to prefer deploying internal labour given their skill endowments acquired through years of training and practice.

The growth of the ITES segment, at least some segments of it, by itself is conditioned by reliance on external labour to fulfil in-house requirements. The rise of 'third party' call centres who provide services to clients in the US or the UK is representative of ICTs' ability to enable firms to rely on distant labour pools for their service provision. In fact, such outsourcing has led to a number of protests by trade unions in the client firms as it not only reduces jobs in call centres there, but also undermines the strength of such labour institutions. However, within such third party call centres, we do not find firms relying on external labour. This is due to two factors. One, and the most important, is the need for quality control of service delivery. Second, by having access to a large set of internal employees, firms have the advantage of deploying them in various segments or across different clients as per demand.

5. Scope for Women's Employment and Gender Neutrality
ICTs do undermine some of the conditions that are seen to have hitherto excluded women from entering into the labour market like reduced need for physical labour. However, such possibilities do not automatically translate into greater avenues for women's employment. We find that there are more important institutional barriers like social construction of work as men's work or women's work. Despite rapid introduction of ICTs in the automobile industry, the industry has not witnessed increase in women's employment in traditional departments. Only in new segments like systems do we find a small proportion of employees being women. Work in the auto industry is still seen as 'masculine' work. Such perceptions continue to influence the entry of women into this sector.

The ITES sector, however, employs a significant share of women, largely because of the fact that attributes required for such work like 'emotional labour' are seen to vest with women. It must also be mentioned that gendered construction of work is quite fluid and can transform over time. To this extent, ICTs do have the potential to enhance the employment prospects of women. Simultaneously, we also observe that even work in call centres is being recoded as 'masculine' work by the male employees in the workforce. Thus, if ICTs are to be used as tools to promote women's employment, it needs to be accompanied by socio-cultural transformations to ensure that women move away from work that are already typecast as women's work.

Annexe I

Questions to be asked to Department Heads, Auto Firm

1. Primary Functions of their Department

No.	Functions
1
2
3
4
5
6

2. Various jobs and their roles, numbers

Job Type (Level)	No. of employees		Required minimum qualification (incl. Training in computer usage)		Changes in nature of tasks undertaken/Other remarks
	10 years before	Current	10 years before	Current

3. Date of implementation of ERP
4. Reasons for implementation
5. Reactions of people at various levels
6. Changes in work content: increase, decrease, quality, any new tasks required
7. Decision on no.of people to be interviewed.
8. Overall impression on productivity improvements
9. How many would be redundant? Would they have removed anyone if there were an exit policy?

Annexure II
Check List/ Questions for Employees in the Auto Industry

1. Name
2. Designation
3. Year of joining
4. Initial job?
5. Educational Qualifications
6. Trade union member? If yes, name of TU
7. Nature of job
8. Were you informed about ERP before implementation?
9. How often do you use a computer in a day? Frequency? Total Time used in a day?
10. Were you given any training before use? If yes, details: time, title
11. If no, how did you learn?
12. Are you using the computer to perform the same task as before?
13. If yes, what are the advantages? Less time? More output? Less monotony?
14. If no, what is the kind of work that you do?
15. Does using computers mean additional work?
16. Or greater intensity?
17. What are the overall benefits of ERP?
18. Do you prefer to work in the pre-ERP environment?
19. Do you think that without labour laws, you may have lost your job due to use of computers?
20. Did you have discussions with TUs on the possible impact of ERP solutions on employment in your firm?
21. Do you feel that your manager has better control over your work than before?
22. Do you feel that the control you used to have over your work has come down?
23. Do you think that you know more about the work you do, and its importance in the overall organisation?
24. Will use of ERP affect your promotion prospects?
25. Do you use the computer for any other additional purpose?
a) For communication? b). For information collection? C). For learning?

Annexure III

Questionnaire for Call Centre Employees

1. Name of the firm: ____________________________________________

2. Location of the firm: ____________________________________________

3. Types of Service offered by Firm: ____________________________________________

4. Division/Department employed: ____________________________________________

5. Designation

I Personal Information

1. Name of Professional: ____________________________________________

2. Age: (1) 18-21: o, (2) 22-25: o, (3) 26-30: o, (4) 31-35: o,

(5) 36-40: o, (6) 41-45: o, (7) 46-above: o

3. Sex: (1) Male o (2) Female o

4. Marital Status: (1) Single: o, (2) Married: o, (3) Divorced: o (4) Widower: o (5) other ______

5. Do you have children? (1) Yes o, (0) No o

If yes: how many? ________________

6. Religion: (1) Hindu o, (2) Muslim o, (3) Christian o

(4) Others: __________ (please specify)

7. Caste: (1) FC __________ (please specify)

(2) BC __________ (please specify)

(3) SC/ST _______ (please specify)

8. Place of Origin:

(1) Metropolitan _____

(2) Urban _____

(3) Semi-urban _____

(4) Rural _____

9. Parent's Occupation _____________

II Educational Qualifications/Institution

1. Could you please indicate the highest degree you attained?

Please also give some information about call centre related certifications.

	Art	Science	Commerce	Institute
Less than XII
12 Standard
Graduation
Postgraduation
Certified Course in Call Centre Technology	Specify:

2. In which year did you enter first job? 19_____

III. Information on current and previous employment:

1. Date of joining this firm: (DD/MM/YY) ___ / ___ / 19___

2. Position currently held: _____________________________________

Could you please give us information about previous positions held within this firm?

Please use the coding below the table

Position Held	Period	Nature of Service	Responsibility	Gross Salary per Annum	Source of Information about job?

Coding: Position held:

(1) Agent (2) Supervisor (3) Manager (4) Any other (specify)

Period:

(1) Less than a year, (2) 1-2 years, (3) 2-3 years, (4) 4-5 years, (5) more than 5 years

Responsibility (number of people reporting to you):

(1) No personnel, (2) 1-3 personnel, (3) 4-10 personnel, (4) 11-20 personnel, (5) 20 and above personnel

Gross Salary:

(1) 50, 000 to 1 lakh per annum, (2) 1 lakh to 2 lakhs per annum, (3) 2 lakh to 4 lakhs per annum,

(4) 4 lakh to 6 lakhs per annum, (5) 6 lakhs to 10 lakhs per annum, (6) 10 lakhs to 20 lakhs (7) 20 lakhs and above

Source of Information

(1) Advertisement, (2) Campus interviews, (3) Recruiters, (4) Personal contacts, (5) others (specify)

4. Could you please give us information about your previous job/s held?

Please use the coding below the table

Job held/Firm name and locality	Period	Responsibility	Gross Salary	Reason for leaving?	Source of information about job?

Coding: Same as above plus

Reasons for change

(1) Better Salary (2) Reputation of joining the firm (3) More Challenging work (4) Change in job status (5) Private reasons, specify

IV Current Work and Employment

1. Entry question: Could you please describe a typical working day?

___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

2. Can you please tell us how you were selected?

a) For your current job?

(1) Aptitude/written test š (2) single Interviews š (3) Multiple Interviews š (4) Promoted based on peformance š Promotion based on years of experience Any other, specify

b) For your first job in the current firm?

(2) Aptitude/written test š (2) single Interviews š (3) Multiple Interviews š (4) else š

c) For your first job in the industry?

(1) Aptitude/written test š (2) Single Interviews š (3) Multiple Interviews š (4) else š

V. Working Conditions:

1. Are you

(1) a permanent employee?

(2) a contract employee ?

2.1) If yes, please specify the period of contract ________

(1) 1 year (2) 2 years (3) above 3 years

(3) Trainee

2. Is this mode of employment same for everybody in the firm?

a) Yes. b) No.

3. If no, what are the reasons for differences?

a) Don't know b) More skilled and hence difficult to replace c) Different positions d) Any other (specify)

4. Are you eligible for :

(1) Provident Fund (1) Yes (0) No

(2) Medical Allowance (1) Yes (0) No

(3) Maternity / Paternity benefits (1) Yes (0) No

(4) Health Insurance (1) Yes (0) No

(5) Educational Allowance (1) Yes (0) No

(6) Housing (1) Yes (0) No

(7) Car (1) Yes (0) No

(8) Telephone (1) Yes (0) No

(9) Dearness Allowance, (1) Yes (0) No

(10) Leave Travel Allowance, (1) Yes (0) No

(11) Provisions for Training (1) Yes (0) No

5. What is your gross salary?__________________

6. How much leave are you entitled to :

(1) Annual leave days ______ days

(2) Sick leave ______ days

(3) Casual leave ______ days

7. On an average, how many hours do you work (a) each day ______(night shift)

(b) each day ______ (day shift)

(b) per week ______

8. When was the last time you went on vacation?______________________________________

9. Did you utilise all your entitled leave days the previous year? (1) Yes o, (0) No o

9.1 If no, could you please give us a reason why? ____________________________________

10. In this industry, work is considered to be stressful and strenuous. Do you suffer from any ailments? (1) Yes (0) No

10.1 If yes, can you please specify your answer? ____________________________________

11. Is your work monitored?

12. If yes, please explain how.

13. Does monitoring create stress?

14. If yes, please elaborate.

15. Have you or your colleagues suggested alternative forms of monitoring?

16.If yes, were they acted upon by management?

17. Is there any provision for you to negotiate with management in matters relating to work pressures,

VI Job Satisfaction

1. Now, we would like to ask you some questions about job satisfaction :

On a scale of 1-10, how would you rank the following

Job satisfaction	Rank	Reasons for satisfaction / dissatisfaction
1. Salary
2. Leisure
3. Relationship with Colleagues
4. Relationship with Boss
5. Team Work
6. Professional environment
7. Opportunity for Professional development
8. Content of work
9. Organisational routines
10. Do you feel over-qualified for this job?

VII Prospects for mobility

1. Has anyone, either from Human Resource department or your boss, discussed your career opportunities and future prospects in this firm? (1) Yes (0) No

____________________

2. Do you expect to get promoted next? (1) Yes (0) No

If no, please specify _____________________________________________________

3. Which criteria do you think is the most important ones to be promoted?

essential / important / not important

(1) length of stay in the firm

(2) quality of work

(3) Quantity of work

(4) Ability to work in a team

(5) Acquisition of new skills/certifications

(6) others (specify)______________________

4. How long do you intend to continue in this firm?

(1) 1 year (2) 2 years (3) more than 3 years (4) do not know/open

5. If you decide to leave this firm, what could be the main reasons :

(1) Lack of internal job mobility

(2) Inadequate salary

(3) Lack of challenge/learning opportunities

(4) Better opportunities somewhere else

(6) Others,_______________

6. What are the other likely job opportunities for you outside this industry?

7. Given a choice, where would you like to work with your current qualifications?

8. Can you explain the reasons for the choice?

9. Where would you like to see yourself in five years from now?

____________________________________________________________________

10. How do you intend to realise those plans?

____________________________________________________________________

VIII. Training

1. How do you keep yourself updated?

(Rank the following)

(1) Reading

(2) Courses

(3) In-house training

(4) Colleagues

(5) Other ________________

2. Have you undertaken any training courses (after joining this firm)?

(1) Yes (0) No

2.1 If yes, please specify:

Nature of Training	Period	In-house	External	Source of Funding

3. Did the training have any direct impact on your a) salary or b) promotion prospects?

Could you please specify?

_____________________________________________________________________

4. To what extent have you been able to make use of the training you underwent?

(1) always/daily (2) often (3) rarely (4) never

Please specify how ___________________________________________________

IX. Questions about socialising/networking

1. Do you meet with other call centre employees/working colleagues after work?

(1) Three times a week (2) once a week (3) twice a month (4) once a month (5) hardly

2. During those get-togethers, what are those conversations mostly about?

	Very often	Rarely	Never
(1) Work content
(2) Job openings
(3) Development in Industry
(4) Private Conversation
(5) Others ______________

3. How important do you think are the get-togethers for your career development?

(1) Essential (2) important 3) not important

3.1 If it is essential and important, please explain why

___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

X. For women employees only

1. Related to the question above, have you ever felt that your career development has been

affected due to you being a woman? (1) Yes (0) No

1.1 If yes, could you please specify those factors?

(1) Personal: family/household: __________________

(2) Professional: ______________________________

(3) Institutional level: __________________________

2. Do you see any difference between men and women in regard to their career planning and promotions within the firm? For instance, do you feel that men have better chances of becoming supervisors or managers in call centres? What could be the reasons for differences if there are any?

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

3. Have you ever personally experienced any discrimination from either your colleagues or your boss? (1) Yes (2) No

3.1 If yes, please specify how _________________________________________________

4. Do women earn the same wages as men for the same work? _____

5. Do you know of women who have been discriminated against and not given the same opportunities as to their male colleagues? (1) Yes (2) No

5.1 If yes, please specify how _________________________________________________

6. How would you rate the firm policy with regard to women and in comparison to the former company you worked for? Please specify what you like and what you dislike.

Previous:________________________________________________________

Present:_________________________________________________________

7. To improve the career prospects of women, which firm level policy do think you should be undertaken at the political and at the enterprise level?

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

Thank you very much for your cooperation

Annexure IV

Questionnaire for Head, Human Resources, ITES Firm

1. Name of the firm: ____________________________________________

2. Location of the firm: __________________________________________

3. Types of Service offered by Firm: ____________________________________________

4. Organisational Structure

Job Type (Level)	Required minimum qualification (incl. Training in computer usage)	No. Employed		No. of People Reporting
		Male	Female
Agents/Associates
Team Leaders
Managers
Trainers
Others (Specify)

5. What are the major sources of recruitment?

a) Arts Colleges in Bangalore

b) Arts Colleges in other Metros

c) Technical/Professional Colleges in Bangalore

d) Technical/Professional colleges in other Metros

e) Call Centre Training Colleges

f) Others (Specify)

6. Over time, has there been any diversification of sources?

7. Do you feel that in the future, even school leaving students can be recruited for work?

8. If yes, why has it not happened yet?

9. If no, what are the main reasons?

10. How do you recruit them mostly?

a) Campus Recruitment b) Newspaper ads c) Walk-ins d) Others (specify)

11. Have there been changes over time in the mode of recruitment?

If yes, please explain.

12. How are the employees appointed?

a) Permanent b) On contract

If b), please specify the period of contract ________

(1) 1 year (2) 2 years (3) above 3 years

13. Is this mode of employment same for everybody in the firm?

a) Yes. b) No.

14. If no, what are the reasons for differences?

15. Are the employees eligible for

(11) Provident Fund (1) Yes (0) No

(12) Medical Allowance (1) Yes (0) No

(13) Maternity / Paternity benefits (1) Yes (0) No

(14) Health Insurance (1) Yes (0) No

(15) Housing (1) Yes (0) No

(16) Car (1) Yes (0) No

(17) Telephone (1) Yes (0) No

(18) Dearness Allowance, (1) Yes (0) No

(19) Leave Travel Allowance, (1) Yes (0) No

(10) Provisions for Training (1) Yes (0) No

16. What is the initial gross salary?

17. How are the increments fixed?

18. How much leave are they entitled to?

(4) Annual leave days ______ days

(5) Sick leave ______ days

(6) Casual leave ______ days

19. What are the systems in place for promotions?

20. What are the incentive systems in place to improve productivity?

21. In terms of service delivery, what are the major complaints from clients?

22. What are the corrective steps that have been taken in this regard?

23. Are there any metrics in place to reduce defect rates, success rates, etc?

24. What kinds of performance monitoring systems are in place?

25. Are there any disincentives to improve delivery?

26. What has been the annual employee turnover?

27. Has it come down over time?

28. What are the primary reasons?

29. What do you feel needs to be done to reduce/retain employees?

30. Do you feel that there are inadequacies in the quality of recruits?

31. If so, please elaborate.

32. What is your opinion about the quality of training being provided in call centre training colleges?

33. Do you think that there is a need for some kind of regulatory bodies to ensure quality of training?

34. Do you perceive any differences in the quality of work output between male and female associates?

35. What are the major threats to the growth of this industry in India?

36. What are the steps that you feel that the government ought to take to ensure the growth of this industry?

Additional Resources Read the Abstract and Project Proposal Read the Interim Technical Report