Tapping into the 'standing-reserve': a comparative analysis of workers' training programmes in Kolkata and Toronto

• Published in: Studies in continuing education Vol. 37; no. 3; pp. 317 - 332
• Main Authors: Maitra, Saikat, Maitra, Srabani
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sydney Routledge 02.09.2015; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Adult education; Adult learning; Comparative analysis; Comparative Education; Employees; Ethnography; Foreign Countries; Heidegger (M); Ideology; immigrant; India; Industrial production; Job Skills; Job training; Labor Force Development; Learning Modules; Migrant employment; Multinational corporations; Neoliberalism; Occupational training; Ontario (Toronto); Participant Observation; Qualitative Research; Race; Semi Structured Interviews; Service industries; service sector; Sex; Skill Development; Socialisation; Socialization; soft skill; Soft skills; Stereotypes; Training; Training needs; Training programs; Work Attitudes; Workplace Learning; workplace training; Canada; India; Canada (Toronto); Toronto Ontario Canada; Kolkata India
• ISSN: 0158-037X; 1470-126X
• DOI: 10.1080/0158037X.2015.1043988

This paper examines employment-related training programmes offered by state funded agencies and multinational corporations in Toronto (Canada) and Kolkata (India). In recent years both cities have witnessed a rise in the service sector industries aligned with global regimes of flexible work and the consequent reinvention of a worker subject that is no longer disciplined according to the needs of industrial production. A worker must now be self-regulated, competitive, flexible, with an ability to convey an urbane, English-speaking deportment within the workplace. Training of employees, especially soft skill training becomes crucial in this connection as a form of technology for achieving this end. Based on Martin Heidegger's conceptualisation of 'standing-reserve', we suggest that what training programmes do in the context of neoliberal capitalist production is the creation of an essential quality of human-ness that has to be harnessed, its potentialities tapped and amplified through training. We further suggest that such programmes often remain heavily influenced by race/class/gender hierarchies as well as stereotypical assumptions of desirable/undesirable bodies, forms of socialisation and modes of habitation that often are naturalised in the course of training.