Work-from-home for Bangalore's new middle class women

Dasgupta, Geetisha (2021) Work-from-home for Bangalore's new middle class women. In: Beyond Consumption: India's New Middle Class in the Neo-Liberal Times. Routledge India, London, pp. 224-248. ISBN 9781003098416

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the proliferation of telework/work-from-home among new middle class women employed in the Information Technology (IT) and Information Technology enabled Services (ITeS) industry. It illuminates the structural linkages between the above and some crucial transformations in labour utilisation patterns in cognitive capitalism. These include standardised labour processes, logged workers as well as convenient informalisms, rationalisation in costs of production in the industry, and the peripheralisation of (women) workers that have pushed them towards producing their own conditions of work, and in turn, pushed them home. The chapter explores how these practices have brought about informal spatial segregation of men and women workers, assigning women to the “inner” and less visible spaces, outside the formal workplaces. This has, in turn, gradually confined them to “telework-able” jobs, bringing about critical interfaces between technology, new middle class women, their households, and their employers. It points out the precarity and gendering of a teleworker, the multiple negotiations in the everyday doing of telework, the moments of bargain and agency in it, and the specificities of the teleworking labour processes. It further discusses that work-from-home is a manifestation of agility of capital and its ability to seep into crevices of workers’ lives, embedding itself in specific culturally mediated context and has a distinctive relationship with social class, gender, urban, and cultural aspects in which the worker is embedded.

Item Type:	Book Section
Authors:	Dasgupta, Geetisha
Editors:	Editors Email ORCID Jha, Manish K UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Pushpendra UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
Document Language:	Language English
Subjects:	Social sciences > Sociology & anthropology > Groups of people Social sciences > Groups of people Social sciences > Economics > Labor economics > Labor force and market Technology
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > School of Development
Full Text Status:	None
Related URLs:	Library OPAC
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/7439
Publisher URL:	https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003098416-17

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