Dear MERSENNE Subscribers,
I hope the following -- which I would like to offer you at a
special price -- will be of interest to you:
Virtual Migration: The Programming of
Globalization
A. Aneesh
“Virtual Migration is an exciting, innovative, and brilliant
examination of how software flows replace people flows. It joins the urgent
effort now under way in the social sciences to map a new field of
inquiry.”—Saskia Sassen, coeditor of Digital Formations: IT and New
Architectures in the Global Realm
“Virtual
Migration is a phenomenal book on a very important topic. A. Aneesh not
only describes, explains, and interprets the phenomena of ‘body shopping’ and
virtual migration in the global software industry, with especial emphasis on
India and the United States; he also provides a series of suggestions to improve
policymaking in these rapidly changing areas of the global economy.”—Mauro F.
Guillén, Dr. Felix Zandman Professor in International Management, Wharton
School, University of Pennsylvania
“This is a brilliant and innovative intervention in the study of
globalization that demonstrates how much the specific forms taken by global
institutional arrangements and processes depend on the structure and design of
computer code. Virtual Migration will be invaluable not only to
students in science and technology studies but to scholars in all fields
interested in the troubled politics of the global movement of capital,
technology, and people.”—Akhil Gupta, author of Postcolonial
Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India
Workers in India program software applications, transcribe
medical dictation online, chase credit card debtors, and sell mobile phones,
diet pills, and mortgages for companies based in other countries around the
world. While their skills and labor migrate abroad, these workers remain Indian
citizens, living and working in India. A. Aneesh calls this phenomenon “virtual
migration,” and in this groundbreaking study he examines the emerging
“transnational virtual space” where labor and vast quantities of code and data
cross national boundaries, but the workers themselves do not. Through an
analysis of the work of computer programmers in India working for the American
software industry, Aneesh argues that the programming code connecting globally
dispersed workers through data servers and computer screens is the key
organizing structure behind the growing phenomenon of virtual migration. This
“rule of code,” he contends, is a crucial and underexplored aspect of
globalization.
Aneesh draws on the sociology of science, social theory,
and research on migration to illuminate the practical and theoretical
ramifications of virtual migration. He combines these insights with his
extensive ethnographic research in offices in three locations in India—in Delhi,
Gurgaon, and Noida—and one in New Jersey. Aneesh contrasts virtual migration
with “body shopping,” the more familiar practice of physically bringing
programmers from other countries to work on site, in this case, bringing them
from India to New Jersey. A significant contribution to the social theory of
globalization, Virtual Migration maps the expanding transnational space
where globalization is enacted via computer programming code.
A. Aneesh is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Table of
Contents
1. Of Code and Capital 1
2. Programming
Globalization: Visions and Revisions 14
3. Body Shopping 37
4. Virtual
Migration 67
5. Actions Scripts: Rule of the Code 100
6. Code as Money
133
7. Migrations: Nations, Capital, and the State 153
Appendix A: A Note
on Method 165
Appendix B: Tables 171
Notes 175
Bibliography
179
Index 191
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
208 pages (March
2006)
2 b&w photos, 4 tables, 4 figures
ISBN 0-8223-3669-3 Paperback -
£13.95
SPECIAL
DISCOUNTED PRICE OF £9.75 to MERSENNE Subscribers
Postage and
Packing £2.75
To order a copy please contact Marston on 44(0)1235 465500
or email [log in to unmask] or visit our website www.combinedacademic.co.uk
(PLEASE QUOTE REF NUMBER: M1006VM for
discount)