Ethnographies of the global information economy: Research strategies and methods. Economic and Political Weekly 43(17):64-72, 2008. (original) (raw)
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2006
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With the digital revolution of the 21st century, the Information and Communication Technology (I.T.) industry has loomed with noteworthy gender trends creating a new space of knowledge and evolving culturally with the construction of techniques and technologies. As a natural corollary, such realignments have affected gender constructions and social transitions. Even though new rearrangements are quite at play and where symbolic capital negotiates and navigates a plethora of gender relations across diverse geo-social scales and informs various forms of mobilities. In this dissertation, I examine the dynamics of how individuals and inequalities are reconstructed across multiple scales of the individual, the family and the workplace through their mobility (or lack of it) by bringing in a postcolonial gender lens to the significant discussion of the intertwining of mobility and intersectionality studies and by exploring the multiple conjunctions focusing on the professionals of the Indian I.T. industry. These dynamics contest across various social-geographic scales—individual, family, and workplace, and have constant interventions on producing new rearrangements in gender relations. Despite the new realignments, and as the dissertation debates using ethnographic cases, the critiques of colonialism and postcolonialism constantly intervene where images of the “new woman,” “colonial masculinity,” or a “new patriarchy” continued to be constructed, contested, and even imagined on multiple levels. This dissertation explores the process of gendering at three different scales. On the first scale, I have examined an individual’s identity consumption as gender roles naturalization varies across various scales, problematizing around family and workplace. Second, I investigate the family’s setup in creating a gendered milieu and subtly influencing work culture within the I.T. industry. Third, I examine the roots of gendering in the I.T. industry especially for women professionals in each hierarchical mark. I have examined the vivid gendered experiences and realities of I.T. professionals from diverse social and economic backgrounds in contemporary India. In this dissertation, gender remains the center of discussion across the scales leading to various realizations of social configurations in affluent social individual realities and experiences.