“We Are Not Contractors”: Professionalizing the Interactive Service Work of NGOs in Rajasthan, India

abstract

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been much studied for the impacts of neoliberalization on their funding, procedures, and motivations. In this article, I use a case study from Rajasthan, India, to show how conflicts that have been generated by recent trends in development funding are taking a specific shape at the scale of NGO workplaces. A process of professionalization is occurring that is altering NGO-client interactions and the hiring priorities of NGOs. I use the framework of interactive service work to argue that previously close relationships between fieldworkers and clients have become shallow encounters, characterized by a relative interchangeability of provider and customer. The work of an NGO fieldworker has become deskilled and degraded. For the NGO I studied, deskilling brought about a rapid turnover of senior staff, who were replaced by low-paid, low-caste fieldworkers. The change in staff spurred the management of employees’ emotional labor as the NGO leaders attempted to generate the necessary emotional connections between fieldworkers and clients, so its contracted project could move forward successfully. Changes in the caste composition of staff, coupled with new labor processes in villages, also created tensions about the status of the NGO’s work as a social service. The research adds depth to previous studies of neoliberalism’s impact on service workers in the Global North and South and to the literature on the professionalization of development.

Key Words:

• nongovernmental organizations
• India
• professionalization
• service work
• emotional labor
• caste

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-0734156) and the Melburn G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. My thanks to Elise and the staff in the AllS office for all of their help. Research assistance from Monika Gaud and Richa Dhanju was invaluable to this study, and my thanks extend to their families. Special thanks to the Sharma family and Brooke for their support in the field. Members of the Texas A&M Critical Geography Working Group provided many useful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. I am indebted to Henry Yeung and three anonymous reviewers for insightful comments that improved this article.

Notes

1 The term client (in English) was one that the Rural Power fieldworkers used. Their meaning was synonymous with customer. Although elsewhere I suggest that fieldworkers acted to create patron-client relationships (O’Reilly 2010), I use the term client here as the fieldworkers did.

2 For example, NASSCOM (2006, cited in Poster 2007) projected that Indian call-center jobs would triple to 1 million by 2008.

3 The Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Commission for Other Backward Classes (n.d.) selected Other Backward Classes on the basis of “social and educational backwardness.”

4 The Government of India, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (2009), offers the following definitions of Scheduled Castes: “extreme social, education and economic backwardness arising out of the traditional practice of untouchability” and Scheduled Tribes: “indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large and backwardness.”

5 For other ways in which fieldworkers aim to increase participation in a project, see O’Reilly (2010).

6 The GOR gives a “no-objection” certificate to contractors that indicates that the work has been completed as reported. Without this certificate, a contractor that has worked for the GOR before will not be rehired.

7 Caste is mentioned in the literature on Indian call centers (Budhwar, Varma, Singh, and Dhar 2006) and is given explicit attention in studies of manufacturing (Chari 2004), brokering (Jeffrey 2009), and unemployment (Gidwani 2000).

8 Mawdsley et al. 2002 found that English skills may determine an NGO’s ability to find and maintain funding.

9 PRA was a technique advocated by Chambers (1994) to facilitate the gathering of information from communities that would be affected by development projects. The ideal was that the information that was gathered would inform a project’s design. For Rural Power fieldworkers, PRA was an information-gathering technique only; neither they nor the villagers were designing projects from the data that were collected.