Dear EUROPEAN-SOCIOLOGISTS 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 -
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