Reengineering India

Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy

Bibliographic Data

ID20006316
AuthorsCarol Upadhya (0000-0003-2413-3951, corresponding author)
Year2016
Pages359
Publication date2016-07-07
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueReengineering India (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199461486.001.0001
OpenAlexW4236131098
Open LibraryOL28604498M
ISBN9780199461486
LanguageEN
Citations received36

Reengineering India explores India’s post-liberalization transformation through the lens of the software industry. It is an anthropological study of work, capital, and class in the software industry, viewed as a key site where novel forms of work and worker-subjects, dispositions, and social identities are being fashioned, and new aspirations and social imaginaries are introduced, worked out, contested, and often transformed. It traces the multiple genealogies of software capital and its modes of value generation and explores the production, shaping, and circulation of Indian information technology (IT) labour. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bangalore’s software companies, the book examines the organizational practices of these companies to unravel the conjunctions of work, power, culture, and subjectivity in these global workspaces. It also maps the interconnections between IT labour and capital, social mobility, and the reconstitution of the middle class, and explores the diverse lives of ‘Indian culture’ and ‘middle class’ identity as mobile IT professionals pursue their projects of self-fashioning and social mobility within a transnational social field. Highlighting the agency of IT workers, organizations, and entrepreneurs in India’s post-liberalization reconfiguration, the author argues that the forms and modalities of capital, work, identity, sociality, and subjectivity that have been forged in IT workspaces are not just by-products of globalization, but have been deeply shaped by the social and historical conditions of their making. Although the software industry has been central to the fashioning of a ‘new India’, it remains deeply embedded in older structures of inequality and modes of accumulation

Agency (philosophy) · Capital (architecture) · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Globalization · Identity (music) · Political science · Public relations · Social change · Social science · Social stratification · Social transformation · Sociology · Subjectivity · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Gender Studies · Computer software industry · Economic aspects · employment · India · Information Technology · Middle class · Social classes

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