Everywhere is becoming the same? Regulating IT-work between India and Germany

Abstract

The world is flat this popular account of current developments celebrates transnationally operating companies as great equalisers . Such tendencies of homogenisation come up against limits, however. Focussing on Indo-German project work in software programming, this study analyses the complex interrelations between the business models of transnationally operating companies and localised standards of regulating reproduction. They result in marked differences between the ways in which labour power is utilised in the companies Indian and German subsidiaries. The world is not flat instead, transnational corporate activities draw upon the combined and uneven development of world regions and reinforce difference rather than reducing it.