1) " The chapters in this volume examine practices in technical domains ranging from the life sciences, to urban planning, to social administration, to finance. But it is clear that their goal is not to understand technical operations per se. What, then, draws them together? In what follows, we suggest that despite the diversity of objects and sites that these chapters consider, they are linked by a common interest in examining processes of reflection and action in situations in which ‘‘living’’ has been rendered problematic. These situations provoke reflection on questions such as: What is human life becoming? What conventions define virtuous conduct in different contexts? We propose the concept of ‘regimes of living’ as a tool for investigating how such situations are structured today"
2)"The cyber-hub is primarily a switching station between the global scale of high- technology applications and adaptations at the regional scale. It is a portal between global and regional scales of technological innovations whereby local actors are enrolled to make useable in local markets. Bruno Latour uses the term ‘‘translation’ to denote the interpretations by actors of their own interests and that of the people they enroll. By providing a series of translations, the cyber corridor hopes to become an important detour for global companies. First, the combination of impressive infrastructure and low costs makes the corridor comparatively attractive to software companies from India, but also from Australia and the West, that seek to test and develop their products for small and emerging markets. For Indian software servicing, the corridor is also an ideal site for expanding offshore business in South-east Asia"
3) "The ecology of expertise is thus a ‘‘high-tension zone’’ of constant cross-referral between the recent past and the projected future, between rigidity and flexibility, between insiders and outsiders. Singaporean citizens are used to considering themselves among the most Westernized Asian subjects, and yet they must now compete with educated expatriates from post-socialist China and impoverished India. There is mounting intra-ethnic Chinese strain as mainland Chinese students and professionals seem to enjoy greater benefits, scholarships, and jobs than local ethnic Chinese. Students are concerned about career chances, and they believe that they have become less eligible for university scholarships"
4) "Wealth, a Singapore official declares, is now ‘‘generated by new ideas, more than by improving the ideas of others.’’Marketable ideas depend on exploiting specific qualities of the population. However, the government faces the problem of a small but steady outflow of its own talented elite, while trying to maintain a critical mass of well-educated people who can be the basis of new knowledge industries. To attract international expertise, clustering infrastructure is built to localize world-class institutions and experts in technological zones. The ‘‘cluster-development’’ strategy connects the state, as venture capitalist, with foreign research institutes and global companies, creating a network that fosters interactions, risk-taking, and innovations among expatriate and local knowledge workers.
5) " Whether in the creation of a biotech center or a digital corridor, the two cases are concrete examples of the assemblages of neoliberal reasoning, authoritarian rule, and governmentality that have created distinct regimes of human worth. In the new ecology of belonging, schemes that coordinate market or scientific skills with social citizenship have privileged foreign experts over most citizens. New ethical dilemmas are generated as local people feel themselves perilously close to becoming second-class citizens or biological resources made available to global drug companies. At the same time, the recent expulsions of foreign workers indicate the complex and contingent outcomes of such assemblages of power, and the ethical claims of ethnic majorities and religious groups that have to be negotiated in ecologies of expertise"
Technopreneurialism: the importance given to entrepreneurs, especially expertise and innovators with business orientations is a new area of sociological enquiry in STS. For example, the South East Asian countries are reimaging development not on the basis of their annual GDP and its increase by production in industries, but through the successful operations in the knowledge economy.
Citizenship: this study contributes to the way how citizenship is viewed and understood in a technocratic society, where technology defines the economy and other social infrastructures and policy. This book gives a great example of how expertise in technological knowledge economy makes some superior citizens and others as secondary. One of the good insight from the book is how certain kind of cultural biases such as racism, regionalism etc affects citizenship even in a knowledge economy based society and reproduces inequality and stereotypes.
Knowledge economy: this directly derives from the Foucauldian understanding of knowledge as a power. He gives an example of how royal societies of Europe and colonial institutions from the period of renaissance onwards created a hierarchical epitome, which outlasted any kind of alternative knowledge production and became the founding stone of capitalism. The same issue is again surfaced in the case of the South East Asian economy, where the production of a certain kind of knowledge is discriminating a certain section of the population. For example, the popular culture does not give an account of people who are working in sweatshops of India, whose labour become the reason for earning more foreign currency than any other and being the largest second employer after agriculture, is becoming invisible in the discourses around so-called nation-building, this due to our obsession with knowledge economy .
"Global phenomena are not unrelated to social and cultural problems. But they have a distinctive capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstract-ability and movement, across diverse social and cultural situations and spheres of life. Global forms are able to assimilate themselves to new environments, to code heterogeneous contexts and objects in terms that are amenable to control and
valuation. At the same time, the conditions of possibility of this movement are complex. Global forms are limited or delimited by specific technical infrastructures, administrative apparatuses, or value regimes, not by the vagaries of a social or
cultural field."
1) The decline of the Asian tiger model: the author gives empirical examples of how this industry oriented economy was left by both Singapore and Malaysia. On the other hand, they were introducing new economic policy based on neoliberal ideas of expertise, technological innovation, the boom of service sector etc. the author quotes a press conference where the Singapore supremo declares about a new economy based on expertise and service boom rather than the manufacturing and industrial orientations
2) Knowledge economy: one of the basic reason for this change is the new economic policies oriented towards a knowledge economy. The knowledge economy was boosted by starting technical universities and other greater infrastructure to get the benefits out of it. The ecology produced by it envisions a new way of development. According to author “Particular alignments of knowledge, politics, and ethics also constitute an ecology of positions, whereby diverse subjects are administered in relation to each other. The government of diverse populations increasingly depends on the neoliberal calculation of the worth, as individuals and populations become operable through specific knowledge’s, techniques, and expertise"
3) Nativism, clash of citizenship and resistance: it is well argued in the book that, this change provoked a greater retaliation from the 'native' citizens who include both the elites of past who controlled the export-oriented economy and subaltern classes who are losing jobs due to structural changes in the economy. The new definition of citizenship through global assemblages and import of expertise made these people believe that they become secondary citizens and state were more preferential towards the foreign experts. “Citizenship becomes invested with technological and risk-taking values, foreigners, it appears, have been the ones to benefit most handsomely from government largess. The moral demands of a technopreneurialism citizenship have risen higher as citizens are expected to compete with Asian foreigners on home ground. The continual influx of expatriates and their coding as the scientific experts or entrepreneurial subjects have coincided with the retrenchment of less competitive workers in a variety of fields. Growing public anxiety has surfaced in the state-controlled newspaper. Some letters to the editors request that first job preference be given to locals and that only unfilled positions be occupied by foreigners"
The main argument of the chapters by Aihwa Ong is about the transformation of world order, where the assemblage of various agents, technocrats. Economic institutions and technology define and produce the phenomenon of global assemblages. It is no longer viewed by the world that development is a unilinear, hierarchical way of material progress which ultimately leads to socio-economic wellbeing of a community. their main argument is that the regime is not defining citizenship based on nativity, regionalism, caste etc, but an aspiration of producing expertise and their contribution to the technologically enhanced 'development is defining the priorities of citizenship. This doesn’t mean that the earlier hierarchical structures were completely eroded with the invasion and envisioning of ' global assemblages’, but at least they are in conflict with this new way of flexible service-oriented economy. Aihwa Ong gives the example of biopower boom in Singapore and ITES corridor in Malaysia having a continuous threat from the existing 'political societies' such as native Chinese in Singapore. the author also talks about the issues related to the emergence of biopolitics and counter-politics to it as the empirical example of how global assemblages are having resistance from the ground and how it becomes a study material to understand the interrelation between ethics, politics and technology.