Profiting from people management practices: An introduction

Abstract

The global impact of ‘offshoring’, including that of information technology (IT) and related services, to developing nations such as India has been a topic of great interest and debate to academics, practitioners and policymakers (Arora and Athreye, 2002; Arora and Gambardella, 2006; Arora, Arunachalam, Asundi and Fernandes, 2001; Athreye, 2004, 2005; Banerjee, 2004; Budhwar and Bhatnagar, 2009; Malik, 2009; Malik, Sinha and Blumenfeld, 2012; NASSCOM, 2014a; Thite and Russell, 2009). The high rates of technological change and increased competition have forced IT businesses and their managers to continuously reinvent their business models. It is through such constant renewal of business models and change management efforts of business leaders that the Indian IT industry has continued to sustain high levels of growth, even in a post-global financial crisis era (Malik, 2013). From humble beginnings in the early 1970s, the Indian IT industry has come a long way. Current estimates suggest that the Indian IT industry has revenues in excess of US$118 billion and employs around three million people (NASSCOM, 2014a, b, c). Numerous metaphors have been used to portray the growth story of India’s IT industry, for example, the ‘horse that flew’ (Vittal, 2004), the story of ‘blind men and the elephant’ (Rahman and Kurien, 2007) and ‘from underdogs to tigers’ (Arora and Gambardella, 2006) are among the most popular discourses. Our book is different from earlier expositions on the Indian IT industry (Arora and Gambardella, 2006; Banerjee, 2004; Budhwar and Bhatnagar, 2009; Thite and Russell, 2009). While these accounts have tended to focus on the supply and demand side dynamics of human capital and related explanations of growth, our collection differentiates on a number of fronts.