Workforce in Indian Information Technology (IT) Industry: Exploring NSS Employment and Unemployment Survey
The present paper examines the situation of software workers in India wherein the paper focuses on the disparities across sub-population distinguished socio-economic and regional characteristics and also attempt is made find the determinants of IT workforce within the household level characteristics.
Competition, Regulation and Strategy
The IT industry (both software and hardware) is characterised by 'vast consumer side scale and scope economies' which are incomparably larger than in other industries with supply side network economies like pipelines or electricity distribution. In IT the supply side economies are also incomparably larger because the marginal cost of an additional unit of the software or hardware especially the former is very small. But its uniqueness arises on the demand side. The interaction of these two economies, in a situation of heightened technological dynamism, imposes a greater degree of contingency, and hence path dependency in the developments in the industry as a whole. It makes possible giants like Microsoft and CISCO. Even as they extract a significant part of the scale economies in the form of large profits, such firms are competitive in the more relevant dynamic sense. In this respect these industries are therefore distinguished from nearly all other prior industries. Traditional anti-trust like regulation or price regulation is entirely outmoded for the development of these industries. Strategies with the most potential would involve promoting inter-firm linkages, promoting industries with the least need to be in contact with other firms, in fresh clusters. The costs of disassociation are too large even for large countries attempting to have a role in the evolution of IT industries, so that closed-door approaches are almost entirely unworkable.
Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930
This book presents the legal and business history of corporate ownership of employee knowledge. Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical skill were their 'property,' or at least their attribute. In most sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundational and widely accepted truth that businesses retain legal ownership of employee-generated intellectual property. In "Working Knowledge", Catherine Fisk chronicles the legal and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of employee innovation from labor to management. This deeply contested development was won at the expense of workers' entrepreneurial independence and ultimately, Fisk argues, economic democracy. By reviewing judicial decisions and legal scholarship on all aspects of employee-generated intellectual property and combing the archives of major nineteenth-century intellectual property - producing companies - including DuPont, Rand McNally, and the American Tobacco Company - Fisk makes a highly technical area of law accessible to general readers while also addressing scholarly deficiencies in the histories of labor, intellectual property, and the business of technology.