Description
Book SynopsisAn ethnographic analysis of the work of computer programmers in India working for the U.S. software industry illuminates the growing phenomenon of "virtual migration"
Trade Review“
Virtual Migration is an exciting, innovative, and brilliant examination of how software flows replace people flows. It joins the urgent effort now under way in the social sciences to map a new field of inquiry.”—Saskia Sassen, coeditor of
Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm“
Virtual Migration is a phenomenal book on a very important topic. A. Aneesh not only describes, explains, and interprets the phenomena of ‘body shopping’ and virtual migration in the global software industry, with especial emphasis on India and the United States; he also provides a series of suggestions to improve policymaking in these rapidly changing areas of the global economy.”—Mauro F. Guillén, Dr. Felix Zandman Professor in International Management, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
“This is a brilliant and innovative intervention in the study of globalization that demonstrates how much the specific forms taken by global institutional arrangements and processes depend on the structure and design of computer code.
Virtual Migration will be invaluable not only to students in science and technology studies but to scholars in all fields interested in the troubled politics of the global movement of capital, technology, and people.”—Akhil Gupta, author of
Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India“Aneesh’s arguments are well-organized and effectively communicate the often jargon-ridden world of complex technologies for those who have yet to go virtual themselves. . . .
Virtual Migration itself opens up a very real (as opposed to virtual) space for discussing new forms of migration, governance, and globalization in which geographic perspectives and voices still have much to contribute.” -- Angela Gray * Cultural Geographies *
Table of Contents1. Of Code and Capital 1
2. Programming Globalization: Visions and Revisions 14
3. Body Shopping 37
4. Virtual Migration 67
5. Actions Scripts: Rule of the Code 100
6. Code as Money 133
7. Migrations: Nations, Capital, and the State 153
Appendix A: A Note on Method 165
Appendix B: Tables 171
Notes 175
Bibliography 179
Index 191
