Tapping into the ‘standing-reserve’: a comparative analysis of workers’ training programmes in Kolkata and Toronto

This paper examines employment-related training programmes offered by state funded agencies and multinational corporations in Toronto (Canada) and Kolkata (India). In recent years both cities have witnessed a rise in the service sector industries aligned with global regimes of flexible work and the consequent reinvention of a worker subject that is no longer disciplined according to the needs of industrial production. A worker must now be self-regulated, competitive, flexible, with an ability to convey an urbane, English-speaking deportment within the workplace. Training of employees, especially soft skill training becomes crucial in this connection as a form of technology for achieving this end. Based on Martin Heidegger’s conceptualisation of ‘standing-reserve’, we suggest that what training programmes do in the context of neoliberal capitalist production is the creation of an essential quality of human-ness that has to be harnessed, its potentialities tapped and amplified through training. We further suggest that such programmes often remain heavily influenced by race/class/gender hierarchies as well as stereotypical assumptions of desirable/undesirable bodies, forms of socialisation and modes of habitation that often are naturalised in the course of training

Producing the aesthetic self: an analysis of aesthetic skill and labour in the organized retail industries in India

Drawing on the concept of aesthetic labour, this article examines how skill training programmes in the organized retail industries in Kolkata modulate underclass female service worker-bodies to align them with the corporeal ideals of a globally fetishized consumer-citizenship aesthetics. Applicants for the entry-level jobs in retail are usually young women from economically underprivileged families, who are routinely viewed as being ‘deficient’ in the basic social, communicational and cultural norms. This necessitates a refashioning of the workers’ personhood by changing their bodily deportments, hygiene standards, communicational skills and social etiquettes. Yet there is little sustained examination of the impact of such skill training on the everyday lives of young female employees who are simultaneously tied to the aspirations for corporate social mobility as well as the vagaries of their own personal lives imbued with poverty, low wage and socio-economic precariousness. Based on a two-year ethnography in shopping malls in Kolkata, this study makes an original contribution in reflecting on how, while female service workers might very well learn to inhabit spaces like shopping malls through a learnt performance of embodied consumer cosmopolitanism under aesthetic labour regimes, their class backgrounds continue to produce moral surveillance, frictions as well as restrictions

A KINETIC ANAYSIS OF THE DEGRADATION OF GRAFTED ANIONIC POLYACRYLAMIDE GEL UNDER NONISOTHERMAL CONDITION

Grafted anionic polyacrylamide gel has been synthesised in the laboratory following radical polymerisation process. Kinetics of thermal degradation of synthesised gel was evaluated under nonisthothermal condition by integral approximation method to determine the thermal stability of the material from thermogavometric study. The activation energy for the thermal degradation was found to be significantly high for the gel material

Skill formation and precarious labor: the historical role of the industrial training institutes in India 1950-2018

This paper explores the historical and ideological contestations over the meaning, nature and scope of industrial skill training in state-sponsored Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) in their attempts to create a disciplined and committed labour force in India. Through a combination of conceptual insights drawn from Indian labour historiography and ethnographic participant research, the paper addresses the challenges faced by ITIs in maintaining a unified, centralized vision for industrial skill-training of workers under conditions of vastly uneven geographical development of the industrial sector and progressively intense interregional capital mobility in contemporary India

Negotiating Precariousness: Exploring the Lived Experiences of South Asian Immigrant Women Working as Home-Based Entrepreneurs in Toronto

No abstract available

Training to be entrepreneurial: Examining vocational education programmes for young women in Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) in Kolkata

Since the 1990s there has been a growing need to develop workers who are entrepreneurial and adept in behavioural, interpersonal and inter-functional skills to fit the changing nature of jobs in the emerging urban service labour market of Kolkata, the capital of the eastern state of West Bengal, India. Skill training, under the aegis of contemporary vocational training in state-funded Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), is no longer restricted to imparting the hard skills necessary for accessing industrial employment. Rather, it extends to work on students’ dispositions – by stoking their aspirations for ‘middle-class’ ideals of social mobility and life-styles without the actual economic and social advantages of middle-classness. This chapter focuses predominantly on female students from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds in order to firstly highlight the rising popularity of vocational education amongst young women eager to access the urban service labour market in Kolkata. Secondly, such an emphasis foregrounds the gendered and classed norms of contemporary vocational education valued by the service industries, including flexibility, neatness and docility. By drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of governmentality, we suggest how skill training programmes can become a mechanism for regulating and implanting in workers an entrepreneurial attitude so that they become not only economically productive, malleable and disciplined workers, but also accountable for their own lives. The premium placed on the individual initiatives of young students thereby absolves vocational educational institutions or the state of the larger structural fallout from unemployment and labour market vulnerabilities

The Production of Neoliberal Subjects through Employment Training Programs: A Comparative Analysis of Workers’ Training Programs in Kolkata and Toronto

No abstract available

Laboring to create magic : the new worker in the emerging retail industries of Kolkata

textMy dissertation focuses on the means through which a new worker-identity is getting crafted in the city of Kolkata in India under the impact of neoliberal economic policies of the state on one hand and the changing modes of capital formation on the other. Kolkata’s position as the pre-eminent city of British India in the nineteenth century had led to a huge influx of industrial capital. However, the post-independence era saw a gradual flight of capital due to a long history of political and social turbulence. With the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, both national and trans-national capital have started flowing back into Kolkata, especially in sectors such as real-estate, retail and service industries. This has led to a huge proliferation of expensive shopping malls and cafes in the city employing a large urban youth population, usually from under-privileged backgrounds. With the state giving up its former faith in socialist principles and instead strongly committing itself to neoliberal economic reforms, the future of development for Kolkata is getting tied to its capacity to attract corporate capital, particularly in organized retail and service sectors. As such, urban labor is coming under a tremendous scrutiny to delineate an identity according to principles of flexibility, self-discipline and responsiveness to the needs of contemporary private capitalist interests. In spaces like shopping malls and exclusive cafes, workers are repeatedly trained and indoctrinated to show an affective capacity to serve, be cheerful in their work and to display through bodily comportments the signs of a global cosmopolitanism that can sustain consumption. However, with most of the workers themselves coming from low-income backgrounds with little or no knowledge of the roles they are asked to play as part of their work, uncertainties and anxieties exacerbate the already precarious position of these young workers. This study therefore looks at how workers negotiate everyday work environments and how such work environments in turn alter and condition their identity through multiple strategies of discipline and control emanating from both the neoliberal state as well as corporate institutions.Anthropolog

Uncertain itineraries: dual system of training and contemporary TVET reforms in India

Over the past decade and a half, skill development has assumed critical importance in India’s policy discourse. In this context, in 2016, a German inspired vocational training programme called Dual System of Training was adopted by the Indian government to ensure a judicious balance of classroom learning and on-the-job training for young people. Based on semi-structured interviews with twenty-five national level policy makers in India we examine the drivers of this particular policy adoption and suggest that the sedimentation, expansion and institutionalization of the policy remain embedded in a bureaucracy-driven centralised and hierarchical framework, thereby limiting much of its transformative promise and potential. Our contextual focus on TVET reforms in India characterised by massive youth demographics, competing political compulsions, uneven capitalist development and increasing nationalistic tendencies reveal the complexities of policy adoption from the Global South perspective, an area that remains understudied