From outsourcing to crowdsourcing: Assessing the implications for Indian workers of different outsourcing strategies

Janine Berg, Uma Rani and Nora Gobel

Chapter 13 in A Modern Guide To Labour and the Platform Economy, 2021, pp 209-224 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Traditional business process outsourcing has been at the heart of India's economic development strategy, with Indian firms offering IT-enabled services such as software development, back-office data entry and call centre work, to client firms located in other countries. In the mid-2000s, another form of outsourcing - crowdsourcing - emerged, which allows firms to use digital labour platforms to outsource work directly to individual workers. This chapter analyses the implications of this new outsourcing model for the working conditions of Indian workers, comparing the findings from a survey of Indian workers on micro-task platforms with similar types of 'offline' work, using data from India's National Sample Survey for 2017. Despite the opportunities of platform work, the chapter argues that compared with work in business processing centres, the outsourcing of work through digital labour platforms has been less beneficial for Indian workers.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance; Innovations and Technology; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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