Scholars Award: A Study of Rural and Prison Sourcing of Information and Communication Technology Labor

Poster Winifred R, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This project engages in on-site field work in India to examine the shift in the labor force for information and communication technology (ICT) from urban centers to rural villages, poor communities, and prisons. The PI will conduct 100 interviews with workers at a rural unit, RuralShores, in four states, and she will engage in ethnographic observations at a prison, Cherlapalli Jail in Andhra Pradesh, which is the home to India's first global outsourcing center of this kind. The goal of this project is to shed light on the societal implications of this shift, which are far from clear. On the one hand, Indian firms are able to offer job opportunities to groups that have been traditionally excluded from technologically-based employment. On the other, these jobs pay wages far less than ICT outsourcing jobs in urban areas, and are less likely to be protected by state labor regulations or represented by unions. Three factors will be the focus for determining the viability of this shift: transferring technical skills to marginal workers, providing supports for social mobility, and upholding data security in the process. Results will have broader impacts on policy discussions of poverty alleviation, representations of rural and female workers in STEM occupations, and international regulation of data crimes and cyber security. Technical Summary At the theoretical level, this project will serve to adjudicate between competing notions within Science and Technology Studies of what ICT means for marginalized workers in the global south. Affirmation of propositions from modernization theory would indicate that sub-sourcing of ICT labor to places like villages in India has indeed provided mobility avenues out of poverty for the rural poor through technical training. Alternatively, positive results for a post-colonial computing framework would suggest that sub-sourcing of ICT labor does not in fact represent a viable platform for long-term employment, but instead a re-segregation of the poor in villages; hence, solidifying the digital divide along geographic lines. In addition, findings on data security will indicate what kinds of threats these rural and prison business outsource processors pose to information systems, and whether the stereotypes surrounding these workers as unsafe are upheld by the evidence.