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.

項飚

1972年齣生於溫州市區一個教師傢庭。1990年從溫州中學畢業保送北京大學。1998年獲北大碩士學位，當年受邀免考牛津大學博士，2002年獲英國牛津大學博士學位。現任牛津大學人類學院研究員。

研究成果

項飚研究員長期從事人口流動和社會、經濟變遷的研究，曾在國內和澳大利亞、印度作長期的實地調查。主要著作有Making Order from Transnational Migration: Labor, Recruitment Agents and the State in Northeast China (普林斯頓大學齣版社，即齣)； Global Body Shopping (普林斯頓大學齣版社2007，獲2008年度安東尼利茲奬)；《跨越邊界的社區》(三聯書店，2000；英文版，Brill Academic Publisher，2005)。