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Neoliberal Subjectivities at Work

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Using the Indian Information Technology (IT) industry as the empirical context, Neoliberal Subjectivities at Work develops a comprehensive conceptual and analytical framework for studying contempor...
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  • 30 June 2025
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Neoliberalism and the fourth industrial revolution are argued to be the dominant forces transforming work and employment relations in contemporary times. Using the Indian Information Technology (IT) industry as the empirical context, Neoliberal Subjectivities at Work develops a comprehensive conceptual and analytical framework for studying contemporary employment relations governed by techno-neoliberalism.

Examining how employers seek to produce employees as enterprising and technological subjects, how employees become or fail to become enterprising IT subjects and how unionized IT employees seek to contest neoliberalism through citizen-worker rights discourse, the author provides a compelling analysis of the governance and contestations of employee subjectivities. Situated in the extant debates on power, resistance and employment relations this book provides a unique account of theorizing and analyzing employees’ lived experiences of neoliberalism in the Global South. Using the analytics of governmentality and intersectionality framework and studying data generated through documents, videos, and semi-structured interviews, Banday employs a post-structuralist lens to investigate how employment relations are problematized and the consequences on the employees’ lives and resistance in contemporary workplaces.

With implications beyond India and the IT sector as neoliberalism and fourth industrial revolution discourses become mainstream forces governing workers, workplaces as well as policymaking, this is important reading for researchers interested in the sociology of work and organizational and management scholarship in relation to the globalized technological neoliberal capitalism.

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Price: $105.00
Pages: 176
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Imprint: Emerald Publishing Limited
Series: Diverse Perspectives on Creating a Fairer Society
Publication Date: 30 June 2025
ISBN: 9781835490303
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, Sociology: work and labour, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Developing & Emerging Countries, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Social discrimination and social justice, Social mobility
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This theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich account of IT subjectivities breaks new ground in our understanding of how employers and their allies aim to discipline tech workers and how these same workers push back to assert their personhood. While the public tends to view Indian tech workers as the heroes of globalization, Banday exposes the high personal and social costs that lie just beneath the surface of these celebratory discourses. Rendering the familiar strange, Banday’s work forces us to revisit our taken-for-granted understandings of Indian IT workers, the companies they work for, and the social and political conditions that perpetuate both their isolation and their success.

Muneeb Ul Lateef Banday is an Assistant Professor in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the Goa Institute of Management and an advanced postdoctoral researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies, University of Bern. Its research interests include neoliberalism, labour studies, decoloniality, gender, caste and the future of work, among others. As a critical management studies scholar, Muneeb is particularly interested in the interrelationships among power, discourse, and subjectivities at work.

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. ‘Reskill or perish’: Producing and regulating the conduct of neoliberal IT workers
Chapter 3. ‘Don’t be happy’: Commitments and contradictions in becoming enterprising IT subjects
Chapter 4. ‘Our union is like a sleeper cell’: Unionism as counter conduct within neoliberalism
Chapter 5. Conclusion