"In my mind, this language crashed into contemporary descriptions of the economy of the late 20th century (mentioned in part 2), with a focus on flexible specialization, flexible production, and flexible, rapid response to an ever-changing market with specific, tailor-made products. Was I watching as the images developing in scientist's minds incorporated, within the body, models of a system and how its parts interact that is being given great salience by forces in the society at large? Or was I watching as scientists your life to biological model that went out from science into the society and in turn enlivened our general concepts of what it takes to make a robust organisation? Or were these models arising completely independently of each other?"
The couple of questions the author tries to answer in this book defines her main arguments. The first one is how we perceived the body and what is the 'taken-for- grantedness' in it? The second question is how this perception and 'taken-for-grantedness' about body and immunity is different around 20 to 30 years ago from the present? The third one is regarding the relationship between this ' change in perception of body and the dramatic changes happened in all aspects of life in united states including health care, education and neoliberal policies in political economy.
from her wide ethnographic study specifically focused on health, body and immunity tries to understand this correlation and argues that different time and space along with its socio-cultural imagination defines the 'taken-for grantednes' of body and immunity. The idea of lab space as an ideal condition to understand the body is negated by the author. for example, the author argues that the social conditioning towards national security and defence in the 1970's and1980's in the middle of cold war played a significant role in reimagining the immunity system as military set up and body as a nation state. the end of her argument is today ' human body is again reimagined as a flexible system like that of global flexible and specialized economy, where flexibility is considered as desirable feature liked in every aspect of life.
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 main argument of this book is about how we need to look at globalisation, technology and labour in a realistic way by getting rid of the mystic illusions around the grand phenomenon of globalisation, the book is mainly focused on how women are used as gendered labour for certain tasks and how it is leading to the bigger exploitation when compared to their male counterparts. The author is also offering a birds-eye view of globalization's functioning, processes, and driving forces in the area of labour. She studied four major areas of the economy where women are working: the first one in electronic industry, second on garment workers, the third one is home-based workers at manufacturing processes industries and the fourth on middle-class women who are working in Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES). This offers an analysis of the various changes and effects caused by the new globalization policies and paradigms which are especially affecting the living and working conditions on women workers. She also analyses the global sectorial trends and their ramifications and cutting through the hype on India's growth statistics, which negatively affected the poorest and middle-class labouring section. The most important point raised by the author is the increasing insecurity emerged from this changed political, economic and social paradigm changes.
The main argument of the article is about how the process of 'organizing ' labour was declined or eliminated in a country like the United States and how unions responded to this defensive era. On one hand, the paper unpacks the myths surrounding the decline of labour unions in such chronic capitalist space and how each of these capitalist systems is different from each other at different legal and state level. For example, he comes up with the pro-union attitude of Scandinavian capitalist countries in comparison with anti-union attitude in the United States. The paper also looks into the different ways workers are organized today in the United States. He demolishes the myths of workers indifference towards union in neoliberal era and individualism as reasons for the decline of unionisation, but he points out “to well-organized, massive, and often violent opposition (Durrenberger 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996; Johnston 1994; Vanneman & Cannon 1987). Other factors in labour’s decline are structural, such as the flight of capital to low-wage countries and areas of the United States in which unions are weak, the shift from an industrial to a service economy"
This book is all about exploring a way of life embedded in a mode of work which has several forms of complications and entanglements. The book does not come up with any value-oriented arguments regarding call centre work and the economy and lifestyle fostered by it. The alterations happened in the way Indian middle class approached certain kind of labour and its aesthetics is explained very well in this book, especially from the era of the 1990s. According to the author, if we dig out for an argument, she noted that how flexibility became a 'necessary caveat for upward mobility' to an aspiring class of young urban Indians who are at the peak in demography. The author also points out how this flexible economy enabled by IT and BPO related works became historical markers of Indian middle-class-ness. as a cultural and linguistically nation like India, this particular kind of flexible economy unified the dreams and suffering of professional, undergraduate bulk of Indian youth. One of the signifying result produced by the author is regarding the nightlife of these young workers and their class composition, which can be defined as the new middle class. According to the author, one of the key juncture for this techno boom was created by the pressure of the Indian middle class, who are products of the colonial legacy. The author perfectly states that “over the 1990s, this class has also increasingly pushed for economic reform as an antidote to the failures of the Indian state. The resultant increasing pace of development has delivered a paradoxical reward. Even as the Indian middle class now enjoys the consumerist lifestyle afforded by free-market ideology, it must work harder to define its own cultural boundaries that are being rapidly subsumed by socio-economically equal new middle classes. This book is an ethnographic exploration of the material and symbolic processes that underlie this controversial middle-class expansion and locates call centres within this socio-political milieu.
The article suggests a way forward for science and technology studies by suggesting that it draws from its four genealogies and work towards creating or producing knowledge that enables formation of reflexive social institutions (which are self-organizing, draw from multiple sources and quick in responding to newer circumstances) that are able to address the diverse and complex problems that engulf our lives in the twenty-first century. These institutions could help with issues in areas like health care, environment, computer infrastructure, critical technologies, and biomedical research and policy to ascertain democratic and inclusive decision making.
In elaborating the four genealogies he traces the discipline’s lineage historically and briefly etches out the various influences – intellectual and interdisciplinary -- that have shaped the multifaceted field of STS.
The first being debates over technology in the post-war period, (Heidegger vs the Frankfurt school, debates over the demarcation of unity and autonomy of science and phenomenology, then on the postwar successors like Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Poststructuralism).
The second genealogy as the object-oriented languages like SSK, SCOT and ANT which offered the methods, tools, and vocabularies for STS and by conducting sociological and ethnographic inquiries about the contents of science, laboratories and production of epistemic objects.
The third as the anthropologically informed ethnographies of science and technology (the 1980s onwards) which involve collaborative work alongside technoscientists to come to terms with the rapidly changing networked worlds that are also seeing advances in fields of biology and life sciences. Fischer suggests that science studies around this time perhaps have taken on a role akin to critical theory in 1960s in shaping anthropology
The fourth genealogy is the emergent cosmopolitical technoscientific worlds of the twenty-first century: the new generation of ethnographies of scientific and technological developments, especially in the worlds outside Western Europe and North America, to assess political, financial, technological, cultural, institutional and human capital building blocks and barriers.
Learning from these four genealogies and acknowledging third spaces that are emergent and entangled, and have the potential to transform science, policy and technology and cosmopolitics within and beyond their geographical locations.
The main argument of the article rests in the critique of social constructivism and its conceptual basic premises. Like most prominent scholars in STS, Winner also agrees with the larger idea of 'social construction of Technology, but he disagrees with the negation of early scholarly tradition by SCOT Academicians, who firmly believe that the others who studied technology earlier were only able to study the consequence of society. Langdon winner argues that the mere description and direct commentary upon what constitutes a technology and how it works will not complete picture without writing about the direct consequences happening across the contemporary world from Whale to Reactor.
The main argument of the article is primarily focused on the critique of certain concepts used by Pinch and Bijker in their theory of social construction of facts and artefacts. Even though Russell agrees with the umbrella idea of the social construction of technology, he negates the idea of relevant groups and relativism of knowledge. His major critique is focused on equating science and technology or removing its distinction. He also stresses how a relativist viewpoint misses certain sections of society who are never part of the so-called dominant ideology. He argues that theories such as the labour process give a wider spectrum to understand human and technological interaction and its consequences. His major argument is also rooted in the critique of the elite evolutionary methodology of SCOT in understanding the technology.