[Reader-list] [Announcements] Seminar @ Sarai: Carol Upadhya - Reinventing India in the New Global Economy: Negotiation of Identity in The Software Outsourcing Industry

[Aarti Sethi]

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Seminar @ Sarai: Urban Cultures and Politics Seminar Series
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Reinventing India in the new global economy: Negotiation of identity  
in the software outsourcing industry
a talk by Carol Upadhya
National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore

and screening of film

July Boys: New Global Players
by Gautam Sontiin collaboration with Carol Upadhya

4:30 P.M. Wednesday, 6 September 2006Sarai-CSDS Seminar Room

Drawing on research carried out over the last two years on the IT  
industry in Bangalore and on IT workers, the presentation focuses on  
questions of identity formation, subjectivity, and construction of  
the self among this category of global ‘knowledge workers’. Actors in  
the outsourcing industry occupy a range of positions in the workplace  
and in the global economy, which appear to be central in the shaping  
and structuring of their identities and sense of self – especially as  
cultural categories such as ‘Indian’ and ‘global’ are being  
reformulated and deployed in these new corporate workplaces. The  
presentation draws on software engineers’ narratives about their work  
experiences, and their feelings of belonging, alienation, and  
cultural identity, to point to the contradictory and multiple ways in  
which social identities are being restructured in this context. This  
theme will be illustrated by the film, ‘July Boys’.

July Boys: New Global Players
(part of the film series ‘Coding Culture: Bangalore’s Software  
Industry’)
by Gautam Sonti in collaboration with Carol Upadhya


The Indian software outsourcing industry has emerged as a key node of  
the global economy and the leading edge of globalisation in India.  
The series of films, ‘Coding Culture’, explores the culture of  
outsourced work and the moulding of a new workforce to cater to this  
global high-tech services industry.
July Boys focuses on a small ‘startup’ company in Bangalore that  
designs and produces software products for cellular service providers  
in Europe and the U.S. Turning the tables on the usual outsourcing  
story, July Systems has leveraged U.S.-based venture capital and  
Indian technical expertise to break into the latest high-tech markets.
The film explores the creation of a Silicon Valley-style work culture  
within this ‘cross-border’ company that has one leg in Bangalore and  
the other in Santa Clara, California. It also highlights the  
emergence of new kinds of identities (global, transnational,  
cosmopolitan) that incorporate and transcend pre-existing identities  
such as the national (Indian) and the regional (Tamil). But the  
narratives of the film’s characters reveal a tension between their  
assumed global subjectivity and their nationalist pride in July’s  
achievements as a company founded and run by Indians that makes  
‘cutting edge products’ for the global market.

[Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist and is currently a Fellow  
in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the National Institute of  
Advanced Studies, Bangalore (NIAS). For more than three years she has  
been researching various aspects of the IT industry and IT workforce  
in Bangalore.]


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