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In the last 30 years global investment in Indian real estate has transformed cities like Delhi. Construction firms attract investors by presenting construction as transparently manifesting vetted architectural plans and agreed upon budgets. This article examines the politics of such performed transparency by focusing on the communicational genres which accompany these urban buildings. The architectural drawing and the contract supported the authority of project managers, and engineers. Yet such genres were only efficacious on the construction site when supported by other genres such as notes and sketches. These genres translated architectural schematics and budgets into the mundane work activities of the site. Produced by subcontractors, these genres shaped the activities of workers – from bending rebar to laying bricks – by framing them as acts of service within relations of patronage. Yet they also supported the authoritative account books filled out by engineers. The genres of the subcontractors translated official forms in ways that enabled the work of construction, while also laying the foundation for their own erasure in the official genres of the measurement and account books. In this way, I argue that techniques of rendering construction transparent actually reproduce the very forms of labor that they seem to supplant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the semiotics of labor through an analysis of a construction skill training program in Delhi. It focuses on recurring struggles between students and administrators over the nature and consequences of the activities they engaged in at the training center. Drawing on the notion of language ideology, it argues that students and administrators invoked different ideologies of labor in framing the value and meaning of productive activities. Under different ideological framings, productive action had the potential to transform the subject in radically different but equally unstable ways. While students worried that engaging in "labor work" could transform them into abject laborers, administrators tried to shore up the notion that "practical" would make students into successful workers. More generally, the paper suggests that attending to ideologies of labor can nuance accounts of how labor transforms subjects and social worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]