Product, equipment, uniform: Material environment and the consumption of work in New Delhi, India
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Authors
Journal Title
Modern Asian Studies
ISSN
0026-749X
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Type
Article
This Version
AM
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Jaju, G. Product, equipment, uniform: Material environment and the consumption of work in New Delhi, India. Modern Asian Studies https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.81178
Abstract
The article focuses on how low and lower-middle class youth employed in new private sector jobs in the booming service economy in Indian cities engage with the material environment of their workplace, and how through their ‘aesthetic scrutiny’ of its materiality, come to ‘consume’ work. The setting is the store floor of a fast-expanding organized retail company, called Spexy, that sells budget eyewear products. Through ethnographic elaboration, the article follows how the Spexy staff deride the un-branded products, un-technical equipment and un-professional uniform at their workplace. The company as constituted of these ‘poor’ materials, is derided for failing in its company-ness, and branded ‘fake’. Materials provide a platform for articulation of larger configurations of ‘feelings’ the youth seek to give and get through formal employment in a private company. These articulations, in turn, reveal larger socio-cultural valuations regarding ideas of social mobility and visibility in contemporary India – where there is a strong interest in brand regimes and brand value hierarchies, fixation with technological education and expertise, and attraction towards corporate work culture in the private sector, and concomitantly, a strong desire among the store staff to craft branded, technical and professional work identities. By putting the scholarship on work and consumption in dialogue, the article demonstrates how bottom-rung urban workers expectantly look to the material environment of company work to fulfil these desires.
Sponsorship
Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford
Embargo Lift Date
2025-02-08
Identifiers
This record's DOI: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.81178
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/333761
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Licence URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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