Cannibalizing Capital: Disruption as Rhetoric, Practice, and Process

• In Event: Organizing Technoscientific Capitalism: Epistemic Values, Practices & Assets - I

Abstract

India’s technology sector implements and develops the internal information-technology systems of the world’s leading corporations including a majority of Fortune 1000 companies. After a period of boom, India’s IT industry is suddenly experiencing a wave of layoffs, worsening working conditions and new managerial strategies. CEOs themselves publicly voice concern about the structural changes in the market and discuss the pressure to redefine the industry in light of ‘digital transformations’. The upheaval in the Indian sector, which employs 3 million people, reveals how global trends in IT and business are created and how these travel, therefore demonstrating the significance of a transnational frame of inquiry. My research in India’s globally connected software sector demonstrates that the language of ‘disruptive innovation’ has permeated management discourse of varied industries and the allied technology firms in this off-shore industry. Traditionally the concept of ‘creative destruction’ has been confined to Schumpeterian and Marxian analyses, to refer to the tendency of economic structures to undergo transformations, such that old value-creating mechanisms are destroyed and give way to new ones. Why are large companies across sectors increasingly employ a crisis-oriented discourse of devastating technology change? There is a tendency among scholars to reduce these discourses to mere buzzwords that are seen as obfuscating the true workings of the firm. In this paper I take this new management outlook seriously and show how ‘rhetoric’ and ‘reality’ co-produce a new compulsion to proactively ‘cannibalize’ existing business practices and workforces which accelerates the very instability that industries seek protection from.

Author

• Devika Narayan, University of Minnesota