Professionalism as a soft skill: the social construction of worker identity in India's new services economy
Professionalism as a soft skill: the social construction of worker identity in India's new services economy
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专业精神作为软技能：印度新服务经济中工人身份的社会建构
DOI：
10.1080/01436597.2023.2223133
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发表时间：
2023
影响因子：
2
通讯作者：
Ray A
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ray A
“专业”曾经是跨国公司的流行语，现在已经成为印度新兴服务业经济的一个共同口号。今天，有志于加入入门级服务角色的年轻人，如呼叫中心，零售和咖啡店的年轻人，要接受密集和严格的培训，以成为“专业人士”，学习规范自己的身体，行为，语言和整体身份，以适应多样化和快节奏的“服务”。虽然文学探索专业的概念，在印度不断增长的服务业强调其企业西方和纪律意识形态的层面，最近的奖学金已经开始记录工人自己如何感知，经验和塑造这些概念。从这个奖学金和民族志研究在浦那市在印度西部的技能培训中心进行，本文探讨了如何专业化越来越多地成为与“软技能”的话语，即使在印度的新服务经济的边缘，以及它是如何被传输，质疑，和（重新）解释。因此，本文提供了一种基于社会建构主义的专业主义观点，认为专业主义不是简单地由强大的国家和企业行为者不受阻碍地强加给被动的新自由主义主体的东西，而是由那些信奉，教导和体现它的人不断改变，符合当地的生活现实，经验，价值观和信仰体系。
Once a popular buzzword for multinational corporations, ‘professionalism’ has now become a common catchphrase in India’s emerging services economy. Today, youth aspiring to join entry-level services roles such as those in call centres, retail, and coffee shops undergo intense and regimented trainings to become ‘professional’, learning to regulate their bodies, behaviours, language, and overall identities, to fit into diverse and fast-paced ‘servicescapes’. Whereas literature exploring notions of professionalism in India’s growing services sectors has emphasised their corporate-western and disciplinary-ideological dimensions, more recent scholarship has begun to document how workers themselves perceive, experience and shape these notions. Drawing from this scholarship and ethnographic research conducted in a skills training centre in Pune city in western India, this paper explores how professionalism has increasingly become entwined with the discourse of ‘soft skills’ even at the margins of India’s new services economy, and how it is being transmitted, questioned, and (re-)interpreted. The paper thus offers a grounded social constructivist view of professionalism, as not something that is simply imposed unimpeded upon passive neoliberal subjects by a powerful state and corporate actors, but rather as continually inflected by those who profess, teach and embody it, in line with local lived realities, experiences, values and belief systems.