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Research on labour in global production networks has raised serious questions about the role played by labour contractors. This article uses a case study of automotive components production in north India to show how labour contractors assist firms to adapt to the rigours of competition in supply chains. We demonstrate that a regional contract labour system has enabled employers to keep wages low, increase firm flexibility, offload the burden of monitoring and controlling workers and undermine collective bargaining and trade union rights. These problems further expose serious weaknesses in the implementation and enforcement of labour laws in India.

Agency-based approaches represent a fundamental advance in how researchers and policymakers can address questions of place-based industrial strategy, including issues of governance, leadership, new technology and regional assets. However, these approaches can be advanced further by recognizing the centrality of discourse in regional change. This paper does this by synthesizing two conceptual frameworks: Grillitsch and Sotarauta's trinity of change agency and Moulaert et al.'s framework of Agency Structure Institutions Discourse (ASID). Deploying two Australian case studies to shed light on drivers of change at the local scale, this paper demonstrates that discourse is a necessary component of transformative regional processes. Furthermore, it contends that successful transformation is presupposed by the extent to which local discourse overlaps with local opportunity spaces and forms of agency. Successful place-based industrial strategies need to mobilize these multiple elements of regional change in order to maximize their potential for success.

Many scholars have questioned the role of the IT industry in India's economic development. Some have correctly highlighted the limited impact of IT firms in creating occupations accessible to less-educated people or the modest impact of industry output on the livelihoods of people from poorer households and communities. There are thus strong arguments against governments giving fiscal and industrial priority to the IT industry. However, this article explains why the state is unlikely to heed this redistributive agenda. It argues that state assistance to the IT industry has been predicated upon four main factors: India's surplus of skilled and technically qualified young workers, the dominant role of software services within the IT industry, the formation of political relations between industrialists and state institutions and, finally, the crucial role of software service export earnings in the stabilisation of India's external position. Even the uncertainty generated by the global financial crisis has, thus far, been unable to dislodge software service exports from their central role in India's economic policymaking framework. Short of a radical change in the status quo, we are unlikely to see a commensurate change in policy settings.

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