Indian call centre employees work through the night, sleep during the day, and listen to foreign voices in accented tongues over transnational telephone connections. Through a description of the nightly and daily lives of call centre workers in the university town of Pune, India, 1–800–Worlds engages with the complex negotiations that underlie the ostensible success of new service economies. As the author shows, the call centre industry is neither insular nor singular but offers a set of s...

Most of us recognize that organizations are everywhere. You meet them on every street corner in the form of families and shops, study in them, work for them, buy from them, pay taxes to them. But have you given much thought to where they came from, what they are today, and what they might become in the future? How and why do they have so much influence over us, and what influences them? How do they contribute to and detract from the meaningfulness of lives, and how might we improve them so...

Over the past two decades anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork, and the role of ethnographers. Ethnographic fieldwork has cultural, social, and political ramifications that have been much discussed and acted upon, but the training of ethnographers still follows a very traditional pattern; this volume engages and takes its point of departure in the experiences of ethnographers-in-the-making that encourage alternative m...

New media, development and globalization are the key terms through which the future is being imagined and performed in governance, development initiatives and public and political discourse. Yet these authoritative terms have arisen within particular cultural and ideological contexts. In using them, we risk promoting over-generalized and seemingly unchallengeable frameworks for action and knowledge production which can blind us to the complex global patterns and promise of social reality.

This critical reassessment of digital proliferation calls for a new approach to technology that includes marginalized, non-western communities.In the digital age, technology has shrunk the physical world into a "global village," where we all seem to be connected as an online community. Yet while we think of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as open and accessible to all, they are in fact commercial entities developed primarily by and for the Western world. Cons...

Appropriately Indian is an ethnographic analysis of the class of information technology professionals at the symbolic helm of globalizing India. Comprising a small but prestigious segment of India’s labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate the country’s economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains...

Online technologies excite the public imagination with narratives of democratization. The Internet is a political medium, borne of democracy, but is it democratizing?Late modern democracies are characterized by civic apathy, public skepticism, disillusionment with politics, and general disinterest in conventional political process. And yet, public interest in blogging, online news, net-based activism, collaborative news filtering, and online networking reveal an el...

This book provides a new understanding of the constellations of logics in Japanese management practices in Asia and the West. Through comparative ethnographic case studies in a Japanese multinational corporation (MNC), the book explores the cultural meanings of family, corporation, market and religion logics at each subsidiary’s site in Thailand, Taiwan, Belgium and the United States.In doing so, the book defines cultural space through an institutional logic approach. It argues tha...

This sharp, innovative book champions the rising significance of ethnographic research on the use of digital resources around the world. It contextualises digital and pre-digital ethnographic research and demonstrates how the methodological, practical and theoretical dimensions are increasingly intertwined.Digital ethnography is central to our understanding of the social world; it can shape methodology and methods, and provides the technological tools needed to research society. Th...

In an interactive and densely connected world, transnational communication has become a central feature of everyday life. Taking account of a variety of media formats and different regions of the world, Adrian Athique provides a much-needed critical exploration of conceptual approaches to media reception on a global scale.Engaging both the historical foundations and contemporary concerns of audience research, Athique prompts us to reconsider our contemporary media experience within...

A comprehensive and practical guide to ethnographic research, this book guides you through the process, starting with the fundamentals of choosing and proposing a topic and selecting a research design. It describes methods of data collection (taking notes, participant observation, interviewing, identifying themes and issues, creating ethnographic maps and tables and charts, and referring to secondary sources) and analyzing and writing ethnography (sorting and coding data, answering questio...

Just as newspapers do not, typically, engage with the ordinary experiences of people′s daily lives, so organizational studies has also tended largely to ignore the humdrum, everyday experiences of people working in organizations. However, ethnographic approaches provide in-depth and up-close understandings of how the ′everyday-ness′ of work is organized and how, in turn, work itself organizes people and the societies they inhabit.Organizational Ethnography brings contributions from...