Date: 19 September 2025, Friday
Time: 13.30 – 14.30
Place: MA-330
“The Arc of ‘Control’ of Work in the Indian IT Industry”
by
Secki P. Jose
University of the West of England
Abstract
There has been a growing consensus for the need to expand our understanding of the connections between the labour process and external social phenomena that impact work and employment (cf. Burawoy 2009, Jose 2025, Mezzadri 2025, Vidal and Hauptmeier 2014, Thompson and Smith 2009). These approaches have generally critiqued the relatively restricted and narrow focus of the current body of ‘Labour Process Theory (LPT)’, with its ‘relatively autonomous’ and disconnected analysis of labour processes (Thompson and Smith 2009).
Though such critiques have served to highlight the varied ways through which the labour process may get impacted by factors external to the workplace, there remains little clarity on how such external factors influence the workplace or how they may be incorporated into Labour Process Analysis (LPA) in a theoretically and empirically coherent manner. For instance, Burawoy (2009), argues that in order for a social scientist to understand the behaviour of workers in the workplace, there is a need to develop ‘Extended Cases’ that have the ability to extend the analysis of work from the workplace in potentially four directions: into the life of interviewees, horizontally in time and space, towards macro phenomena and finally through extensions in theory.
The following paper attempts to contribute and develop these discussions by building upon Jose (2025) which sought to systematically understand the connections between the labour process and the State. This was achieved by showing how workplace bureaucratic management control mechanisms (cf. Edwards 1979) operate within and are influenced by the broader context of the state’s regulatory and legislative system. Such a system is not viewed as being static but evolves with a ‘relative autonomy’ depending on the balance of aggregate capital-labour relations.
The paper develops the idea that control of the labour process cannot be fully understood without an associated analysis of the manner in which employment relationships are entered into (various types of contracts) and the labour market. Such an approach provides a potentially theoretically coherent strategy to analyse work, providing an alternative to approaches such as that of Burawoy (2009) or Thompson (2003) that have sought to develop connections with a somewhat isolated labour process. The paper builds upon the notion of ‘constrained autonomy’ discussed in Jose (2025) – that provides a theoretical means to recognize and analyse the constraints upon the labour process, and therefore the strategies that employers may adopt to overcome these constraints – but develops this further by integrating it with the structure of employment contracts and the sectoral labour market. The analysis reveals and discusses the connections between these spheres of work and employment based on qualitative empirical research with Information Technology Services (ITS) workers in the IT industry in Bengaluru (Bangalore), India.
Bio
Secki P. Jose is a Lecturer in HRM, largely focused on topics related to Employment Relations.
His work focuses on analysing employment/labour/work utilising inter-disciplinary and heterodox approaches cutting across labour economics, labour law and work sociology. He primarily examines aspects related to structural change, economic informality, labour process, political economy of work, the State, knowledge and production technologies.
He has a PhD from the University of Leicester, a Masters in Labour Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai) and an undergraduate degree in Engineering from Kannur University (Kerala).
He has previously taught at the University of Leicester, UCL and SOAS. He has also been part of collaborative qualitative and quantitative research projects in DMU, IMI–Oxford, FAS, NIAS and TISS. Prior to 2010, he worked in the IT industry in India for some years.