1) " The entrepreneur, no longer just a manager, has become an “agent of change,” an ideal worker, an instrument of development, and an optimistic and speculative citizen.is citizen cultivates and draws what resources they can—their community ties, their capacity to labor, even their political hope into the pursuit of entrepreneurial experiments in development, understood as economic growth and uplift of the poor. Most important, entrepreneurial citizens promise value with social surplus; as they pursue their passions, they produce benefits for an amorphous but putatively extensive social body.e entrepreneurial citizen belongs to an imagined community of consumers, beneciaries, and fellow entrepreneurs. If this imaginary of the entrepreneurial citizen sounds grandiose and vague, this is no coincidence; vagueness has been core to the global promise and portability of the entrepreneurial ethos. State and corporate elites point tentrepreneurs as those who can make opportunity out of the innumerable shortcomings of development "
2) "Innovation brings to mind for many high technology: Mars missions, Apple computers, or new smartphone apps. In India, it also signalled the possibility of technological progress not mimetic of the West—a problem central to postcolonial nationalisms writ large (Lu 2010; Chaerjee 1993) but now a question of valorization in patent culture as well.2 Gupta and others argued that a pedal-powered washing machine could also be a site of less recognized but no less profound forms of innovation. Even as these men negotiated what ought to count as innovation, they agreed on the basic vision of the inventions of the few replicated for the benet of the masses—innovators’ others. Modernization theorist Evere Rogers (2003, 42) championed this model of innovation, which he called diffusionism. Like modernization theory, this theory positioned inventors and early adopters of innovations as closest to modernity; others became adopters, laggards, and backward refusers"
3) "Practices of entrepreneurial citizenship oer elites a way of making this diversity productive of value while also legitimizing India’s highly unequal economic order. Sanyal (2007, 224–25) identies microcredit as one way that capital incorporates and generates value out of highly heterogeneous ways of surviving while keeping the poor at a distance. Geographer Ananya Roy (2010) calls the rush to invest and extract prot from loaning to and selling to the poor “poverty capital.”
4) "In the name of innovation, entrepreneurial citizenship asks people to organize and make value out of the lives of others. Others might be consumers. Others might be employees. Others might be those seen as surplus populations requiring management, uplift, and governing through conceptual sleight of hand and novel organizational forms, then, entrepreneurship converts surplus populations into economic potential"
1) The India-Bharath discontinue: the author explains how this discontinuity in the Indian economy, is evident in how India is failing at becoming a full-fledged creating of an entrepreneurial economy based on expertise. after the BPO hype and IT boom also, there is a huge chunk of Indian population even in the outskirts of cities and rural area unaware of what is entrepreneurialism, and still works forces at traditional setting rather than being a ' citizen with the responsibility'.
2) origin: the origin of taking engineers, scientist and innovators as heroic on one hand and leading advocates of entrepreneurialism are rooted in the ideology of neoliberalism, where the state itself withdrawn from the responsibility of social welfare and individuals as corporations are expected to help out the poor for the sake of nation building. The dangerous equation of development with poverty eradication is another reason for the emergence of innovative technology-based enterprenauralsism ideology as a substitute for centralised socialist planning. Existed till 1991.
3) Class, caste and middle class: one of the main question asked by the author in her research is whether India is able to achieve the three goals such as development, creative freedom and uplift the poor through the idea of entrepreneurship. The first problem raised is regarding the participation of all classes. A multi-diverse nation with a brutal colonial past, with brutal hierarchies, will be unable to democratise this process, certainly, this was also happening all around the world. But what makes India more vulnerable is the stronghold of the caste system over the political and economic system. the Indian middle class is largely an out product of an educated, upper caste, who have a dominant representation in all sections of social life, especially in the think tanks, beurocracy and policy-making bodies. This actually harms the idea of a complete enterprenual society
The obsession of India regarding entrepreneurialism dates back to Nehruvian socialism itself. But at that moment it was controlled in the name of public ownership and state-oriented development paradigm. A key example is India’s ambition to become a self-reliable export economy. What makes the difference today is the unbounded chasing entrepreneurialism in the name of technology and enabled services in the context of neoliberalism. The main argument of Lily Irany is regarding the complexity and contradictions emerging from such change in designs of development and policies. such a drastic change where citizens are asked to be responsible (become experts, part of innovations, or least become an entrepreneur) in contributing the nation-building, rather than caring about their civil rights and other social benefits. the major argument by Irany is how class, caste, gender and other diversities in India is affecting or undemocratically favourable to certain group of people, who are in the forefront of designing the Indian public and economic policies such as the idea of 'entrepreneurial citizenship' have a great impact on the less privileged counterparts of them. the rise of India middle class and its composition also is discussed in the context of how their social attitude and understanding about poor is complementing the exploitation by companies, philanthropic groups and investors for their greater economic goals. On one hand, she also argues about the negative implications of glorifying the entrepreneurs and innovators upon workers, peasants and craftsmen who are really contributing to the nation-building to become inferior in the social ladder. She also explains how the neoliberal idea of equal opportunity was sabotaged by social hierarchies inherited from the past generally in the world and particularly in India.
The two main ideas analysed in the book such as 'entrepreneurial citizens' itself is important to my broad research area of sociology of tech, space and work. The first one is regarding the importance of start-ups and work in defining the entrepreneur economy of India. The second is the assessment of socio-cultural imagination behind the relationship between innovation and upliftment of poor enhanced through technology in the epoch of neoliberalism. This helps me to locate the correlation between technology and geographical spaces for my research. for example, the author underlines the contradictions of India(modern) and Bharath (traditional), which surfaces when I try to map out and compare the Bangalore’s technology-based start-ups(which is considered as the established geography for start-ups) with the growing ambitions on technology and start-ups in a small town like Calicut in Kerala. According to the author, even though the Indian IT tycoons and planning elites understand these contradictions in reality and formulate their theories upon it. but they along with the state is trying to reimagine the discourse and policies upon 'development', through imposing entrepreneurialism as an ideology of emancipation of rural masses by themselves rather than state-oriented planning, they are also expected to take the responsibility rather than out crying for civil rights and better social and economic. So technological start-ups are considered as the cutting edge idea for such a hyped venture. The production of expertise, not just for economic purpose, but also to achieve the goal of upliftiment of poor is the primary goal. For my research, I can use this hypothesis to evaluate how successful they were and how it is implemented through start-ups to make entrepreneur communities. If not what are the counter imaginations by the people who are engaging with? For example, how people and workers are responding to such 'burdens' of responsibility to contribute to nation building through imposed self-entrepreneurism? The fact that Indian organized sector and job security becoming a past nostalgia is pointing to the entire process mapped out by the author which makes the last question relevant
Lily Irany as a scholar is famous for her works on cyberspace and its socio-cultural implications. She is mainly focusing on how workers are defending or reacting to the politics of cyber workspace and how they use certain virtual platforms to implement their agendas. she contributed to the research and writing upon the area labour activism in digital space and she is also one of the founding members of 'turkopticon', which is a digital platform where a 'digital worker' can write and share about their employers, who are previously not socially audited by the 'public, because of the invisibility provided by flexible economy. She also spends more than 5 years in studying the underlying cultural logic of Indian entrepreneurism in comparison with so-called developed digital hubs like Silicon Valley. She is currently an assistant professor of communication and science studies at the University of California.