This book showcases issues of work and employment in contemporary India through a critical lens, serving as a systematic, scholarly and rigorous resource which provides an alternate view to the glowing metanarrative of the subcontinent's ongoing economic growth in today's globalized world. Critical approaches ensure that divergent and marginalized voices are highlighted, promoting a more measured perspective of entrenched standpoints. In casting social reality differently, a quest for solutions that reshape current dynamics is triggered. The volume spans five thematic areas, subsuming a range of economic sectors. India is a pre-eminent destination for offshoring, underscoring the relevance of global production networks (Theme 1). Yet, the creation of jobs has not transformed employment patterns in the country but rather accentuated informalization and casualization (Theme 2). Indeed, even India's ICT-related sectors, perceived as mascots of modernity and vehicles for upward mobility, raise questions about the extent of social upgrading (Theme 3). Nonetheless, these various developments have not been accompanied by collective action - instead, there is growing evidence of diminished pluralistic employment relations strategies (Theme 4). Emergent concerns about work and employment such as gestational surrogacy and expatriate experiences attest to the evolving complexities associated with offshoring (Theme 5).

Workplace bullying, a pattern of persistent and targeted emotional abuse within the context of an evolving unequal interpersonal relationship, has so far not received academic attention in India. This book explores the phenomenon of workplace bullying through a series of quantitative and qualitative inquiries conducted in India's Information Technology-Enabled Services-Business Process Outsourcing (ITES-BPO) sector. Through quantitative evidence from two multi-city surveys, the book highlights the incidence of interpersonal bullying at work and the organizational measures available to deal with it. Over one-third of the survey respondents experienced bullying, which was usually from superiors though cross-level co-bullying was also reported. Approximately 70 per cent of the survey respondents described organizational measures including anti-bullying policies, employee awareness and training programmes, encouragement of witnesses/bystanders to intervene in bullying situations, and organizational actions. Through qualitative data, the book provides insights into both interpersonal and depersonalized bullying. The lived experiences of targets and witnesses/bystanders of interpersonal bullying underscore the critical influence of human resources management (HRM) on target coping, the long-term identity work targets engage in as they respond to identity disruptions and the effect of workplace friendship on witnesses'/bystanders' behaviour. The presence of institutionalized bullying facilitates the development of the emergent construct of depersonalized bullying. Across both quantitative and qualitative inquiries, the inclusion of socio-cultural, micro-organizational, macro-organizational, and business, dimensions deepens our understanding. The book goes beyond a country-specific contribution to address gaps in the international literature on workplace bullying and will be of interest to academics and practitioners in the fields of management, organizational behaviour (OB), human resources (HR), industrial relations, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and law as well as to the general reader.

Workplace bullying, a pattern of persistent and targeted emotional abuse within the context of an evolving unequal interpersonal relationship, has so far not received academic attention in India. This book explores the phenomenon of workplace bullying through a series of quantitative and qualitative inquiries conducted in India 's Information Technology-Enabled Services Business Process Outsourcing (ITES-BPO) sector.

Through quantitative evidence from two multi-city surveys, the book highlights the incidence of interpersonal bullying at work and the organizational measures available to deal with it. Over one-third of the survey respondents experienced bullying, which was usually from superiors though cross-level co-bullying was also reported. Approximately 70 per cent of the survey respondents described organizational measures including anti-bullying policies, employee awareness and training programmes, encouragement of witnesses/bystanders to intervene in bullying situations, and organizational actions. Through qualitative data, the book provides insights into both interpersonal and depersonalized bullying. The lived experiences of targets and witnesses/bystanders of interpersonal bullying underscore the critical influence of human resources management (HRM) on target coping, the long-term identity work targets engage in as they respond to identity disruptions and the effect of workplace friendship on witnesses /bystanders behaviour. The presence of institutionalized bullying facilitates the development of the emergent construct of depersonalized bullying. Across both quantitative and qualitative inquiries, the inclusion of socio-cultural, micro-organizational, macro-organizational, and business, dimensions deepens our understanding.

The book goes beyond a country-specific contribution to address gaps in the international literature on workplace bullying and will be of interest to academics and practitioners in the fields of management, organizational behaviour (OB), human resources (HR), industrial relations, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and law as well as to the general reader.

This book showcases empirical studies on workplace bullying from a range of Asian countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, UAE and Vietnam, and is the first-of-its-kind single academic project documenting workplace emotional abuse in the world's largest continent. It encompasses the 'varieties of workplace bullying' conceptualization in addition to category-based harassment and abusive supervision, and presents target, bystander and interventionist perspectives, along with contextualized insights into the phenomenon. The book speaks to the significance of sociocultural factors and draws on several theoretical and substantive bases including dignity, social cynicism, coping, gender, sexual orientation, job insecurity, turnover intention, affective events theory, attribution theory, regulation and policy initiatives. Covering all major regions in Asia where workplace bullying has been found to occur, namely West Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, the book portrays studies which engage both positivist and postpositivist paradigms, utilize an array of methods and include a range of industrial sectors and employment contracts and all levels of the organization. While focused on Asia, the book's insights have international relevance and are of interest to the worldwide community of researchers, practitioners and students of organizational studies, human resource management, industrial sociology, work psychology, industrial relations, labour law, corporate law, health sciences, social work and Asian studies.

This book showcases issues of work and employment in contemporary India through a critical lens, serving as a systematic, scholarly and rigorous resource which provides an alternate view to the glowing metanarrative of the subcontinent's ongoing economic growth in today's globalized world. Critical approaches ensure that divergent and marginalized voices are highlighted, promoting a more measured perspective of entrenched standpoints. In casting social reality differently, a quest for solutions that reshape current dynamics is triggered. The volume spans five thematic areas, subsuming a range of economic sectors. India is a pre-eminent destination for offshoring, underscoring the relevance of global production networks (Theme 1). Yet, the creation of jobs has not transformed employment patterns in the country but rather accentuated informalization and casualization (Theme 2). Indeed, even India's ICT-related sectors, perceived as mascots of modernity and vehicles for upward mobility, raise questions about the extent of social upgrading (Theme 3). Nonetheless, these various developments have not been accompanied by collective action - instead, there is growing evidence of diminished pluralistic employment relations strategies (Theme 4). Emergent concerns about work and employment such as gestational surrogacy and expatriate experiences attest to the evolving complexities associated with offshoring (Theme 5).

The book advances the nascent concept of depersonalized workplace bullying, highlighting its distinctive features, proposing a theoretical framework and making recommendations for intervention. Furthering insights into depersonalized bullying at work is critical due to the anticipated increased incidence of the phenomenon in the light of the competitive contemporary business economy, which complicates organizational survival. Drawing on two hermeneutic phenomenological inquiries set in India focusing on targets and bullies, the book evidences that depersonalized bullying is a sociostructural entity that resides in an organization's structural, processual and contextual design. Enacted by supervisors and managers through the engagement of abusive and aggressive behaviours, depersonalized bullying is resorted to in the pursuit of competitive advantage as organizations seek to ensure their continuity and success. Given the instrumentalism associated with the world of work, targets and bullies encountering depersonalized bullying display largely ambivalent responses to their predicament. Ironically, then, organizations' gains in terms of effectiveness are offset by the strains experienced by these protagonists. The theoretical generalizability of the findings reported in the book facilitates the development of an integrated framework of depersonalized workplace bullying, laying the foundations for forthcoming empirical and measurement endeavours that progress the concept. The book recognizes that whereas primary level interventions mandate repositioning the extra-organizational environment and/or recasting organizational goals to balance business and employee interests, secondary level and tertiary level interventions encompass various types of formal and informal social support to address targets' and bullies' interface with depersonalized bullying at work.

Workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment unfolds as a process, usually recursive and escalating, that involves multiple actors and stakeholders. Through Section 1 of this volume, the antecedents and effects of workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment are detailed. Apart from discussing individual and organizational causative factors and adverse outcomes for targets and organizations, this section presents issues pertaining to target coping and survival and power versus powerlessness as dialectic rather than sovereign. Emergent research examining the physiological impact on targets, the controversial interplay of personality and the striving towards well-being is showcased. Section 2 brings together chapters on the various key players in the workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment scenario. The focus here is on targets, bullies, bystanders, leaders and significant others as well as the range of interventionists (such as HR managers, therapists, organizational practitioners, unionists and so on) who address situations of misbehaviour. The motives, experiences and outcomes of the former group and the roles, dilemmas and challenges of the latter group are elaborated.