From pyramids to diamonds: legal process offshoring, employment systems, and labor markets for lawyers in the United States and India

In this article, the authors argue that offshoring of legal work from the United States has contributed to the fracturing of the longestablished internal labor market arrangements in large U.S. law firms. Drawing on evidence from the United States and India on legal employment, the growth of offshoring, and the rapidly changing nature of work that is offshored, the authors contend that the changes in employment systems in law firms are likely to be permanent, in contrast to other researchers who suggest they are temporary adjustments to the financial crisis. As U.S. law firms are dismantling their internal labor market systems, Indian law firms are partially recreating them

Reconciling Dichotomous Demands: Telemarketing Agents in Bangalore and Mumbai, India

Though outsourcing has created enormous employment potential in India’s information technology enabled services/business process outsourcing (ITES/BPO) sector, the implications for employees remain to be understood. The present paper describes employee experiences in telemarketing outbound call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai, India. Following van Manen’s (1998) hermeneutic phenomenological approach, data were collected through unstructured conversational interviews with 18 telemarketing agents identified vi a snowball sampling and were subject to holistic and sententious thematic analyses. Reconciling dichotomous experiences at work was the label used to capture participants’ core experiences and indicated that while participants’ simultaneous positive and negative experiences contributed to a sense of concomitant stress and well-being, they employed various strategies to maintain a balance between positive experiences/well-being and negative experiences/stress

A Necessary Evil: The Experiences of Managers Implementing Downsizing Programmes

This paper presents the findings of a phenomenological study, which describes the experiences of human resource (HR) managers implementing a downsizing programme in a steel manufacturing organisation in India. Data were collected through conversational interviews. Following van Manens sententious analytic approach, the core theme of a necessary evil, emerged, which indicates that while participants were pained by their task of having to terminate workers and deprive them of their livelihood, they believed that they had no choice in the matter if they had to ensure the competitive position of the organisation and their own survival as employees. The findings of the inquiry provide insights into a virtually unstudied area and raise questions about the role of HR managers in contemporary organisations

Protecting my Interests: HRM and Target\u27s Coping with Workplace Bullying

Based on a study rooted in van Manen\u27s hermeneutic phenomenology, conducted with agents working in international facing call centers in Mumbai and Bangalore, India, this paper describes targets\u27 coping with workplace bullying. Data were gathered through conversational interviews and were subject to sententious and selective thematic analyses. The core theme of protecting my interests displayed two prominent features: the presence of stages and the critical role of HRM in influencing multiple facets of the experience. Major themes, organized around these defining characteristics, include experiencing confusion, engaging organizational options, moving inwards and exiting the organization. The findings break new ground in empirically uncovering the organization\u27s etiological role in workplace bullying, apart from reconceptualizing targets\u27 exit coping response

Clarifying My World: Identity Work in the Context of Workplace Bullying

Based on a study rooted in van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology, conducted with agents working in international facing call centers in Mumbai and Bangalore, India, this paper describes targets’ identity work in the context of workplace bullying. Data were gathered through conversational interviews and were subject to sententious and selective thematic analyses. The core theme of “clarifying my world” captures participants’ attempt to reconstruct their identity following the emergence of identity disruptions stemming from the experience of being bullied. Major themes which include building personal security and insulation, recreating equilibrium, maintaining dignity and poise, re-establishing ontological foundations and seeking continuity in one’s evolution, represent the goals of identity work which address specific dimensions of identity disruptions. The findings highlight the long-term effects of workplace bullying on targets and targets’ attempts to restore their well - being

Globalization of commodification: legal process outsourcing and Indian lawyers

egal process outsourcing (LPO) refers to the contracting of legal work from regions where it is costly to perform, such as the US to areas where it can be performed at a significantly decreased cost. LPO has been made possible by the disaggregation of the legal processes into discrete units, each of which can then outsourced to cheaper service providers. Anecdotal evidence suggests a variety of benefits such as financial gains, opportunities to perform “global” work in a corporate atmosphere and acquisition of important skills and training that enhances the prestige of the host country lawyers. In India, which has played a significant role, LPO firms are viewed as important catalysts in the transformation of the country’s highly stratified legal profession based on social identities. This qualitative study, based on 38 interviews, concludes that the corporate culture was an attractive proposition for lawyers from non-elite backgrounds; however, the commodification of offshored work led to a deprofessionalisation of lawyers, reducing them to “glorified clerks.” As a result, LPO firms only provided parallel avenues for career mobility but did not destabilise the local legal market which at its core remains socially networked

Indian call centres and business process outsourcing : a study in union formation

In this exploratory study of union formation in the Indian call centre/business process outsourcing sector, the authors draw upon evidence from the first detailed survey of members of the recently formed UNITES, and from extensive interviews. This paper engages with mobilisation theory and analyses of trade union formation

Web platform for patient management in clinical trials

Trabajo de Fin de Grado en Ingeniería Informática, Facultad de Informática UCM, Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automática, Curso 2020/2021.Con este trabajo, pretendemos cambiar un poco el panorama actual de estudios clínicos oncológicos, los cuales requieren una interacción constante por parte del médico y el paciente. Por este motivo hemos decido aportar nuestro esfuerzo para hacer que las visitas constantes al hospital sean reducidas al mínimo. En este trabajo, se describe la creación de una plataforma web para facilitar la lectura de datos provenientes de dispositivos wearables, suministrados a pacientes oncológicos, para facilitar sus estudios clínicos. Para realizar esto, se extrajeron los datos de los dispositivos, se procesaron y almacenaron para su posterior uso en dicha web. Para realizar esto hemos dividido cada uno de los componentes necesarios para su elaboración y hemos trabajado en una arquitectura basada en Kubernetes para facilitar su mantenimiento y escalabilidad. Una vez realizado todo esto, podemos indicar que el resultado final ha sido el esperado para una primera versión de esta web. Hemos permitido que el doctor introduzca los datos de sus pacientes para posteriormente proceder a la obtención de datos con el dispositivo y así poder visualizarlos en la página web.With this work, we intend to change the current panorama of oncological clinical studies, which require constant interaction between the doctor and the patient. For this reason, we have decided to contribute our efforts to reduce constant visits to the hospital to a minimum. This project describes the development of a web platform to make it easier to read data from wearable devices provided to oncology patients to facilitate their clinical studies. To do this, data was extracted from the devices, processed and stored for subsequent use on the website. In order to achieve this, we have divided each of the components necessary for its development and we have worked on an architecture based on Kubernetes to ease its maintenance and scalability. Once all this has been done, we can say that the final result has been as expected for a first version of this website. We have allowed the doctor to enter his patients’ data and then proceed to obtain the data with the device, so that it can be displayed on the website.Depto. de Arquitectura de Computadores y AutomáticaFac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu