How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually? The answer is the industry's flexible labor management system - a flexibility widely regarded as the modus operandi of global capitalism today. "Global "Body Shopping"" explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions. Drawing on in-depth field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy examination, Xiang Biao offers a richly detailed analysis of the India-based global labor management practice known as "body shopping."In this practice, a group of consultants - body shops - in different countries works together to recruit IT workers. Body shops then farm out workers to clients as project-based labor; and upon a project's completion they either place the workers with a different client or "bench" them to await the next placement. Thus, labor is managed globally to serve volatile capital movement. Underpinning this practice are unequal socioeconomic relations on multiple levels. While wealth in the New Economy is created in an increasingly abstract manner, everyday realities - stock markets in New York, benched IT workers in Sydney, dowries in Hyderabad, and women and children in Indian villages - sustain this flexibility.

项飚

1972年出生于温州市区一个教师家庭。1990年从温州中学毕业保送北京大学。1998年获北大硕士学位，当年受邀免考牛津大学博士，2002年获英国牛津大学博士学位。现任牛津大学人类学院研究员。

研究成果

项飚研究员长期从事人口流动和社会、经济变迁的研究，曾在国内和澳大利亚、印度作长期的实地调查。主要著作有Making Order from Transnational Migration: Labor, Recruitment Agents and the State in Northeast China (普林斯顿大学出版社，即出)； Global Body Shopping (普林斯顿大学出版社2007，获2008年度安东尼利兹奖)；《跨越边界的社区》(三联书店，2000；英文版，Brill Academic Publisher，2005)。