Community Rights in Land in Jharkhand

This paper examines the manner in which community land rights, which were recognised in the Chhotanagpur Tenancy Act, have been abrogated since independence due to various changes in the law and land revenue system, and the conflicts that have arisen as a result

Assembling Amaravati: speculative accumulation in a new Indian city

The paper explores processes of speculative accumulation through land in the making of a new city in Andhra Pradesh, southern India. Rather than analysing the Amaravati plan as an example of neoliberal urbanization or ‘accumulation by dispossession’, it examines how the project is unfolding on the ground by situating it within the region’s ‘vernacular capitalism’ centred on land and finance capital. The paper maps the processes of speculative accumulation through which value is extracted from land by diverse actors, and describes the practices of calculation, investment and negotiation employed by local landowners to manage their uncertain futures and to insert themselves as ‘stakeholders’ in the development of the new city. The Amaravati case reflects the deepening entanglement of transnational and provincial circuits of capital in post-liberalization India

Ethnographies of the Global Information Economy: Research Strategies and Methods

Globalisation and the increasing complexity of the contemporary world have posed serious methodological problems for sociologists and social anthropologists. This paper discusses new approaches, such as “globa

Book Review: India's middle class: New forms of urban leisure, consumption and prosperity by Christiane Brosius. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010.

This book examines several aspects of India’s post-liberalisation cultural transformation, particularly the highly visible modes of consumption that have come to symbolise the growing and increasingly assertive ‘middle class’. Based on fieldwork carried out mainly in Delhi between 1997 and 2007, the study reflects Christiane Brosius’s earlier interests in visual representations by documenting, through photographs as well as text, some of the new practices and forms of religion, retail, urban public culture, housing, sociality and self-cultivation that have transformed metro cities such as Delhi and Bangalore so dramatically since the 1990s

Afterword: Middle Class Activism and Bangalore's Environmental Predicament

Carol Upadhya suggests that changes in Bangalore’s social composition and political economy have not only affected the consumption practices of its middle classes, but have also shaped public perception of urban environmental problems as well as the modes of civic engagement documented in this special e-issue. India’s new consumer and public cultures are increasingly centred on these new middle classes, whose lifestyles reflect a tension between a rising consumerist culture and growing environmental awareness. While civic activism and initiatives around waste management in Bangalore are aimed at more sustainable urban management, they fail to address the need for more equitable and democratic mechanisms of public governance. Middle-class actors rarely raise the twin questions of municipal governance and local democracy that must be addressed if long-term solutions to environmental degradation are to be found. This afterword, therefore, invites us to analyse the political economy of consumption and waste that links it to a larger critique of the ‘world-city’ agenda that underlies Bangalore’s development planning

Management of Culture and Managing through Culture in the Indian Software Outsourcing Industry

The rise of the software and information technology (IT) enabled services industry in India is emblematic of the latest phase in the development of global capitalism, in which services and ‘knowledge’ work are increasingly relocated from the post-industrial economies to low-cost locations in the developing world. The development of enclaves of high-tech offshore production and services (as well as low-end services such as call centres) in industrialising countries such as India raises new questions about globalisation, labour and cultural identity. First, the outsourcing of IT services across national borders, and the organisation of software development projects through multicultural, multi-sited ‘virtual teams’, have oregrounded the question of culture and cultural difference in the corporate workplace. Second, key sites of global capitalism such as Bangalore’s IT industry have produced culturally marked categories of globalised technical workers who are linked into the global economy in novel, technology-mediated ways. The emergence of the figure of the Indian software engineer in the global cultural economy is the outcome of several processes, both discursive and practical. These include theories and techniques of ‘cross-cultural’ or ‘global’ management that have been developed to manage multinational workforces; the specific conditions and modes of organisation that govern outsourced offshore work, such as the ‘virtual team’; and the transnational work experiences of both Indian software engineers and their Western counterparts, which have produced standardised narratives about cultural difference that in turn structure interactions in the workplace and shape the subjectivities of workers

A New Transnational Capitalist Class?: Capital Flows, Business Networks and Entrepreneurs in the Indian Software Industry

The software industry has produced a new kind of transnational capitalist class in India. Most of the founders of software firms have come from the 'middle class', building on their cultural capital of higher education and social capital acquired through professional careers. This class, and the IT industry to which it belongs are also distinguished by their global integration and relative autonomy from the 'old' Indian economy dominated by the public sector and a nationalist capitalist class. The entry of multinationals into the IT industry has produced synergies that have helped it to grow and, for these reasons, the IT business class is also one of the most outspoken votaries of globalisation