Between the cloud and a hard place: New computing infrastructures and the rebirth of just-in-time logics

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 25. Technology and Work

Abstract

This paper pushes the current discussion on the digital economy beyond the focus on a small number of high-profile, digital firms and suggests that computing infrastructures and corporate logics are changing more broadly. Futuristic narratives of AI and robotics obscure the subtle but powerful shifts that cloud computing implies at an infrastructural level. Cloud computing – a method of aggregating and redistributing software on a flexible, on-demand basis – represents a major shift in software use and distribution. The on-demand paradigm, a central facet of the new digital economy, has been studied in the context of the gig economy but not in the context of software itself. These developments call for a revitalization of debates on just-in-time logics beyond the realm of the sectors that represent a seemingly autonomous ‘digital economy’.

Computer technologies have come to represent a major segment of the “fixed costs” all capitalist enterprises are compelled to make. Firms in every sector of the economy depend on internal computer systems to speed up, rationalize, and organize information-based bureaucratic functions. As a product of the “offshore” wave, India’s software industry, over the last 25 years, has come to manage, upgrade and customizes these internal technology systems of Fortune 1000 companies.

Based on a 110 qualitative interviews in an off-shore IT industry, this paper examine the rise of a unique mode of organizing information technology. Dominant digital companies are notorious for being radically asset-light, with no inventory or vast workforces of their own; yet they possess the power upend labor relations and the norms of business. Does the cloud-enabled IT ecosystem compel incumbents to search for new forms of flexibility and scalability? With its strong ties with diverse corporate sectors, this industry is well positioned for a study on the reconfiguration of technology-business relations at national and global scales.

Author

• Devika Narayan, University of Minnesota