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This study investigates a practice that allows workers based in India to work online on projects for corporations in the United States, representing a new mode of labor integration. In the absence of direct bureaucratic control across continents, the question arises how this rapidly growing labor practice is organized. The riddle of organizational governance is solved through an analysis of software programming schemes, which are presented as the key to organizing globally dispersed labor through data servers. This labor integration through programming code is distinguished from two other systems of organization-bureaucracy and the market-while bringing out the salient features of each system in terms of its ruling principle: bureaucracy (legal-rational), the market (price), and algocracy (programming or algorithm). The logic of algocratic systems is explored methodically to analyze global work.
This study inquires into a practice that allows workers based in India to work online on projects for corporations in the United States,1 representing a new mode of labor integration. In the absence of direct bureaucratic control across continents, this rapidly growing, but understudied, labor practice raises a question about its mode of organization: How is this distributed work governed? As globally distributed work does not take place within a single firm, it cannot be governed through usual mechanisms. This study attempts to solve the riddle of organizational governance by demonstrating how global work is governed through the design of the work process itself, focusing on the role of software code as the key to governing globally dispersed labor through data servers.
With globally accessible data servers, this form of labor organization covers a staggering array of work activities: research and development in software, insurance claims processing, accounting, data entry, transcription and translation services, customer interaction services, geographic information systems, animation, data conversion, financial and credit analysis, engineering and design, website development and maintenance, remote education, market research, documentation handling, tax preparation, and human resource services like employee benefits and payroll. There are more than 800 firms in India that provide information technology (IT) and information technology enabled services (ITES) to corporations in the United States and other countries (Nasscom 2006). In 2005-2006, over a million workers were employed by the Indian IT industry whose revenue from foreign sources jumped from US$ 9.55...