Low Wage in High Tech
An Ethnography of Service Workers in Global India
Kiran Mirchandani, Sanjukta Mukherjee, and Shruti Tambe
Reviews and Awards
"Low Wage in High Tech hits on a topic that is absolutely cutting-edge. So much research has been done on call centers and IT labor, but few have addressed the much more far-reaching issue of the 'secondary' labor from this industry. The book uses an analytical framework that is nuanced and illuminating. Based on an elegant ethnographic analysis, it takes us inside these communities so that we can understand the experiences of these workers in their everyday lives."--Winifred Poster, Washington University in St. Louis
"In this carefully researched and well-written book, an impressive team of authors exposes the underside of India's IT sector. The authors have done an admirable job putting together a text that is detailed in its attention to the personal stories of those they interviewed, nuanced in its theoretical scope, and broad in its contributions to many areas of scholarship, including neoliberalism and service work, gender, caste, and occupation, and precarity in the global South."--Smitha Radhakrishnan, Wellesley College
"Low Wage in High Tech is a very interesting study of the liminal zones of globalization, where neither formality nor informality really describes the situation on the ground. It does a wonderful job of bringing in the idea of habitus, and relating it to large-scale economic processes. The book keeps gender front and center without reifying Indian gender ideologies."--Heather Levi, Temple University