What three (or more) quotes capture the critical import of the text?

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May 13, 2019

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"

May 13, 2019

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"

May 13, 2019

1) "The portrait of the body conveyed most often and most vividly in the mass media shows it as a defended Nation-state, organised around the hierarchy of gender race and class"

2)"even though the task of finding culprits seems both fruitless and misguided, the implications of the ideas that I discuss in this book to include an emerging sense of an organisation of the world that will benefit only certain people. So, even though no one individual, and no one group, is at fault, it is no less important to identify what the emerging " common sense" is and how we come to think of it as natural and desirable"

3)" the magnitude contemporary shift in body imagery that we have begun to glimpse in the statements reported above might lead us to wonder whether it is happening in connection with some major shift in the social order. Certainly, many political economists are trying to describe a major shift in the process of production that began in the 1970s. This Shift associated with late capitalism and often termed flexible specialization, has been called " the signature of a new economic epoch(Borgmann,1992;75). The "flexibility" in this new shape of the economy refers both to labor and two products: Labour markets became more variable over time as workers move in and out of the workspace more rapidly; the process of labour itself varies too, workers taking on managerial tasks and managers spending time on the Assembly floor, as dictated by changing production conditions. Products also become more flexible: Design process grow more versatile and Technology more able rapidly to adapt to the needs of the production"

May 2, 2019

1) "Developments here have tended to be incremental rather than fundamental, such as the introduction of multiple stitching machines capable of more Complex styles of stitching; sewing itself remains labour intensive in excess"

2) "Young workers to demonstrate their abilities were often used by management to push up productivity targets, thereby creating conditions for limitation and sometimes exit for older workers unable to keep pace"

3) "Under globalisation, however, there has clearly been a relatively sharp tilt towards the service sector in terms of employment as well as contribution to GDP"

4) "It primarily refers to the industrialized capitalist world of Europe and the United States. The phenomenon of Rising of the service economy there has to be, first of all, located in the enormous expansion of Agricultural and industrial surpluses available to support such tertiarization"

5) The historical root of the concentration of women in the service sector play in the fairly Universal pattern change in women's lives affected by the process of capitalist industrialization itself, which had engendered a new form of economic dependency of women on wage-earning male breadwinners"

 

May 2, 2019

1) "A corporate-sponsored cultural revolution established the concept of markets in American culture as a means of justifying corporate power (Doukas 2003). The concept of the market is symbolic and plays a ritual role in supporting prevailing practices and justifies authoritarian methods of labour control in global systems (Collins 2002, Griffith 1987), and it, therefore, has a direct bearing on unions ‘effectiveness".

2) "American unions have two dimensions: organizing and servicing. Organizing is the use of personnel and resources to increase the strength of the union by organizing more work sites and workers to control a greater portion of the labour market in an area or industry. Organizing can extend to electoral and legislative politics when unions mobilize support for candidates or causes. Servicing is negotiating and enforcing contracts that state the terms and conditions of union members’ work. It entails policing of contracts to be sure that employers are in compliance and processing grievances to resolve alleged contract violations".

3) In 1995 a four-year study that Service Employees International Union (SEIU) commissioned concluded that members prefer resources to go toward getting them better contracts, wages, benefits, and job protection. Leaders want to implement an organizing model to organize unorganized workers and to elect labour-friendly politicians. The two models of union behaviour are at odds because each requires different uses of the same scarce resources such as money for salaries (Durrenberger & Erem 2005a, Wells 1996)".

4) Worker disinterest, individualism, or some inscrutable difference between the United States and European countries do not account for this decline. Rather, it is due 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, and the changes of law and administration that have moved unions toward being bureaucracies for handling quasi-legal cases (Durrenberger & Erem1997; 2005a). Union leadership gained the stability of the servicing model at the price of organizing power, but because that guaranteed and enhanced their positions of power, and a predictable if the closed community of power, they were willingly complicit".

 

May 1, 2019
In response to:

1) "On the one hand, apocalyptic theories of global imperialism would have us believe that locality is being de-territorialized and subjects rendered into productive and flexible transnational labour by the onslaught of capitalist modernity. Agentive notions, on the other hand, overdetermine the position of the speaking subject and claim the re-territorialisation of the local in specific instances of Cultural Resistance. In this book, I am concerned with neither urban Indian locale, in dialogue with the transnational call centre, I am concerned with the ways in which the practices that signify this dialectic between the ostensible 'local' and the 'Global' are sought to be normalized.

2) "I was in my I late twenties, and I wondered as to why eighteen-year-old men and women went to work. Why did students who should have been lounging in parking lots, or riding motorbikes on the streets, us closing at the back of class go to work? Why did people stay up late in order to go to work at night? What cruel forms of just-around-the-corner desires animated this relentless movement and the will to slay sleep"

3) Flexibility in this analysis is thus not just the' extensive tendency to the temporary contractual neighbour and the high level of fluidity in the job market'(upadhya and vasavi 2006: I). Flexibility in this account is the word that the workers were formed every night or day, even as days and nights turn into weeks, months, and sometimes years in the will to perfect the ability to be flexible"

4) the middle-class population that has been absorbed, and fostered by the call centre economy in India, is perhaps best described as one consisting of this new set, arising breed that forms and Essential foil, and successor to an older, relatively coherent understanding of what " middle class" connoted- classically, a Nehruvian civil Service-oriented salariat, short on money but long on institutional perks (Mazzzarella 2005:13). This new breed was brash, young, consumerist, and unsteady while also simultaneously more voluminous than the older middle class, given that its borders were far more elastic

 

March 11, 2019

"More generally, public futures are at stake and reflexive social institutions need to be built where multiple technologies interact to create complex terrains or “ethical plateaus” for decision making. Reflexive social institutions integrate knowledge from multiple sources, often are self-organizing and learning organizations,and respond to new circumstances more easily than brittle, bureaucratic forms of agrarian empires, industrial societies, or closed system, input–output, command-and-control economies."

"Reflexive social institutions are also responsive to the evolution of democratic decision making in perforce multicultural worlds. We need an anthropology of science and technology that pays detailed attention to civic epistemologies and cultures of politics, to epistemologies and presuppositions of policy formulation, makingthemmorereflexive, inclusive,andopentoairingandnegotiatingconflicting interests, situations, requirements, and demands in ways that build legitimacy, without thereby making them unwieldy or formalistic."

“As we move into worlds that are increasingly dependent on linked databases and informatics infrastructures, that require new modes of reflexive social decision making, that are accountable not just to instrumental values but also to the differential cultural sensibilities of affected and invested people in different social and cultural niches, we will need enriched anthropologies of science and technology to inform, critique, and iteratively reconstruct the emergent forms of life already forming around us.”

“The cultural skeins, programming“object-oriented languages,”emergent  forms of life,and cosmopolitical marshalling of ingenuity tracked by anthropologies of science and technology productively complicate and make more realistic the demand for attention to the reconstruction of public spheres, civil society, and politics in the technoscientific worlds we are constructing within and around ourselves.”

“With today’s shifts in scale, changes in chronotope, spatial relations, and social organizational forms facilitated by the Internet and other communication, transportation, and dissemination modalities, a more detailed, ethnographic eye is required. Anthropology perforce is becoming a third space, a space of comparative and entangled frames and of emergent forms of life(Fischer2003)”

February 17, 2019

1)" The most obvious lack in social constructionist writing is an almost total disregard for the social consequences of technological choice. This is a social theory and method geared to explaining how Technology arises, how they are through various kinds of social interaction. What tries to show why it is that particular devices, designs, and social constituencies are the ones that prevail within the range of alternatives available at a given time? But the consequences of prevailing are seldom a focus of study. What is the introduction of new artefacts means for people's sense of self, for the texture of human communities, for qualities of everyday living, and for the broader distribution of power in society- these are not matters of explicit concern"

 

2)" As regards the analysis of scientific knowledge, the epistemological program of relativism in the sociology of science remains neutral as regards judgement about whether or not the proclaimed discoveries or theories of scientist are true or not. Extrapolating to technology, social constructivist choose to remain agnostic as regards the ultimate good or ill attached to particular technological accomplishments"

 

3) " The intellectual vogue of social constructivism arises at a crucial time. in the late 20th, a great many people- scholars and ordinary citizens alike- have begun to realize that the key question is not how technology is constructed, but how to come to terms with ways in which our technology-centred world might be reconstructed".

February 16, 2019

1) "I fully support the objective of developing an explanation of the content of Technology as a social product, and so I welcome Pinch and Bijker's discussion. I agree with their criticisms of economist's ' black box' treatments, linear models of innovation, and descriptive historiography. I want, however, to identify a number of weaknesses in the SCOT approach as described in the paper- in particular, its espousal of relativism and of an evolutionary model of technological change; its treatment of 'social groups'; and it's an explanation of their means of influence on development. I shall argue that to transfer the concepts of the sociology of science to Technology is to ignore basic differences between the two, as activities and as products".

 

2) " to counter a scientific notion of facts, and its corollary that establishing these facts does, and should, determine the action taken, we do not need to adopt neutrality which holds each view of social reality as equally valid. To transcend this false dichotomy, I suggest, requires, one to start, not from an essentially academic motivation of injecting relativism into unsatisfactory theories, but from a political commitment to demonstrating the possibility of alternative Technology for alternative goals, and opening up the process of technological development to sections of society denied access to it. Mai Two objections- that a relative approach is inadequate analytically and unacceptable politically-are thus two sides of the same coin. It is no coincidence that some of the most valuable and analytical satisfying critiques of Technologies and their justification have come from movements opposing them and putting forward alternatives"

 

3)” Pinch and Bijker introduce the concept of 'closure' from the relativistic sociology of knowledge: For Technology it becomes the stabilization of an artefact and the “disappearance of problems ". They acknowledge that it is possible that the type of closure mechanism predominant in science and the type predominant in technology are different. This is an understatement. Whatever validity ' closure' may have for depicting how the direction of the theory is settled in science. I suggest it is altogether inappropriate so Technology, except in Limited cases"

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