In Indian popular culture, after the defensive era of trade unions in the '70s and '80s, the unionism and trade union activities were viewed as disruptive and anti-social in nature. one of the few reasons behind such change in collective imagination are 1) the development rhetoric where unions become a barrier to economic progress and productivity 2) the change from socialist narrative to unipolar post-soviet American 'ways'. And economy 3) opening of Indian markets to privatization. This article gives a detailed perspective of what happened in United States industrial relations, which is considered as a model to be followed by other third world countries like India and how they got obsessed with the other two points mentioned above.
This artefact also gives a detailed picture of different kinds of theories and schools in the anthropology of labour, and how significant it is in the empirical level. as a student of tech and labour, theories such as ' collective action gives insights to the modus operandi of most of the Indian unions, which forgot about organizing and focused on servicing upon existing members.
First of all, the way the author wrote this academic work is a good example of how to write a corporate and industrial ethnography. The author actually looks beyond the rigidities of ' Anthropology of work' and it is unusually informative rather than rhetoric’s often seen in those works which claim to be interdisciplinary. From micro to macro, from 'body -politics to political economy, these books help me to bridge the important gaps of my work on labour and technology. For example, the author recreates the lived experience of workers by different analogies rather than monotonous writing without human emotions. This work also helps to picture the manifestation of technology in day to day life and recreates the epistemological break of Indian notion of labour after the boom of call centre economy in the 2000s.
The very idea of the consequence of technology, which is missing in the social constructivist approach, is directly connected to the field of automation and its implication upon the labour and labour force. The technological implications, both in the political and cultural spectrum helps me to understand the response of human agency, especially workers. The question of who is a relevant group is very much important in the relationship between labour and technology, which will give more insights to my upcoming study.
The criticism by Russell upon mere unpacking of technology as a black box gives us a more vibrant methodology such as the labour process, which is directly related to my area of interest 'labour and technology'. He further elaborates that a better understanding of deskilling and technological change along with its consequence gives a new dimension of how technology is an "uninvited guest " for most of the majority underprivileged sections of the population. This helps me to connect the rationale behind the defence of trade unions and workers against automation and how it redefines class politics in the era of the fourth industrial revolution.