Navigating the Age of AI: Technologies of the Self amongst Corporate Workers in India

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 3: Economic and Organizational Sociology

Abstract

While the story of the average professional worker remains central to India’s economic success, it now faces grave threats from labor-replacing technologies such as generative AI. As these innovations reshape labor markets, the neoliberal promise of endless upward mobility through individual entrepreneurial effort encounters both material and justificatory challenges. Conditions of precarity and job insecurity increasingly clash with internalized expectations of career progress and social embeddedness. With AI-based automation only beginning to transform workplaces, tech workers and managerial professionals in India may be experiencing a pivotal historical juncture. Their identities and worldviews—what Bourdieu calls habitus—have been molded by neoliberal ideals of competition and self-reliance. Yet, as AI unsettles established career trajectories, it becomes crucial to ask whether these professionals will begin to question the market’s governing logics. Will they respond in the Polanyian sense, protesting the disembedding effects of neoliberalism, or will they adapt by intensifying their neoliberal “technologies of the self,” as Foucault would describe them? As these workers navigate the existential "rupture" of AI-driven precarity, their responses to such a crisis would reveal the extent to which neoliberal rationalities have moved beyond mere economic doctrines to become a what Bourdieu calls habitus and what Foucault calls “technologies of the self”. This begs us to raise several questions, the larger one being about how corporate professionals mobilize neoliberal technologies of the self to navigate any new forms of alienation or disembedding mechanism produced by AI-based labor replacing technologies, and how their internalized dispositions, or their neoliberal subjectivities shape their capacity for political critique. This inquiry investigates how Indian corporate professionals mobilize neoliberal rationalities to navigate AI-driven precarity by exploring interactions on LinkedIN to study how such practices affect their capacity for political critique.

Author

• Karthik Ramanujam, George Mason University