India is a legendary success story of the global information economy, with the value of its software exports soaring from an estimated 131.2 million US dollars in 1990-91 to 5,100 million in 2000-2001.[1] However, this is only part of a much larger story, with other forms of eWork, including call centres and data processing, spreading rapidly throughout much of Asia.

Thanks to the European Commission’s Asia-ITC Programme, Asian EMERGENCE is now launched, in a collaboration between the Bangkok-based Asia Institute of Technology (AIT), the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia (ECU), Forschungs- und Beratungsstele Arbeitswelt (FORBA) in Vienna and the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) in Brighton.

The project will carry out fifty case studies in various countries including India, Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. Each case will in involve a ‘source’ company in one country or region and a ‘destination’ company in another. These will be added to the case studies already carried out using the EMERGENCE methodology in Europe, Australia and Canada, to produce a truly global picture of the characteristics and dynamics of eWork relocation.

Asian EMERGENCE’s work will be featured at the International Conference on Globalization, Innovation and Human Resource Development for Competitive Advantage, to be held in Bangkok from 17 to 19 December 2002. Further details of the conference can be found on www.som.ait.ac.th/cere/conference/
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The results of the 62 EMERGENCE case studies already carried out in Europe are published in April 2002. For further details on this and other EMERGENCE, see: publications.